Designing with Technical Textiles on Mars: Material Properties and Sustainable-by-Design Principles for Enhancing Efficient Construction in Extreme Environments

The flexibility and adaptability provided by technical textiles make them suitable for the aerospace field. Specific requirements for space structures such as resilience, payload constraints, and economic costs can be tackled through a smart use of the newest technologies in material sciences. The future of space exploration has in store the building of human settlements beyond Earth; therefore, it is crucial to improve and perfect the technologies we use to go to space and sustain human life there. For this reason, this paper focuses on studying textiles applied to a Martian habitat named E.L.L.E., an Extreme Livable Lightweight Environment, by proposing a new combination of materials for an inflatable system that allows to decrease the total weight of at least 30% than current space modules. Experimenting with technical textiles in space will enable a deeper understanding of these technologies to encourage their application in extreme environments on Earth for a sustainable architecture.