Abstract

For millennia, the advancement of technologies for the transformation of raw primary resources into value-added materials has been driven by the massive burning of fossil fuels. This has set us on a path toward a rapidly deteriorating environment, calling for a fundamental paradigm shift in materials and production engineering. At the University of Bremen, we have conceived a radical approach to tackle this challenge, which will both power a green transition on Earth and contribute to a sustainable human exploration of space. We place ourselves on Mars, a potentially habitable but inhospitable world with scarce resources, and rethink the production of materials and parts from scratch. We pursue three main goals: (1) developing (bio-)electrochemical methods for the synthesis of raw materials from low-grade resources; (2) designing and demonstrating low-energy process chains that use these raw materials as input to produce a variety of parts; and (3) devising concepts for production facilities jointly operated by human-robot teams and supported by digital representations of the production processes. The development of the “Martian Mindset” as a transformative, scarcity-driven engineering paradigm will involve the work of a large consortium of Bremen faculties and institutes over the next seven years, as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments.