Living on Mars is a game for squillionaires and the agencies of superpower governments, for Elon Musk and Nasa, not the average citizen. The reason is obvious and simple: it is mind-bendingly expensive and complex to get people and equipment to a planet 140 million miles from Earth. The artists Ella Good and Nicki Kent are, however, undeterred. On a Bristol wharf, next to the M Shed museum of the city’s history, they have installed what they call a “people’s version of living on Mars”, a “prototype Martian house” built to a budget of £50,000, with an additional £20,000 spent on workshops, plus support in kind from a number of construction companies. Their expenditure is about enough, at a guess, to pay for the toothbrushes on a typical real-life space programme.
Their two-level structure looks like a shiny gold bug – a woodlouse? a tardigrade? – perched on a shipping container. It stands small but conspicuous among the masts and rigging of heritage shipping, and the culture and retail buildings and preserved cranes of a former industrial zone. It represents one unit, designed for two astronauts, of an imaginary community that could be built on the planet, where 50 people might stay for months and more. The idea is to provide a “lens” on life on Earth, by exploring how to survive in a place of scarcity and danger.
