The Seed Colony Model: An approach for colonizing space

As humans reach out to the stars in a variety of exploration missions beyond Earth, eventually mission architecture will include constructing a permanent habitat and establishing a colony. Given the complexity of colonizing a planet, such as Mars, a great deal of research, simulation, and planning is necessary to identify the optimal model for colonization in order to guide future mission architectures. One such model, which has received a significant amount of publicity, is that of the “Mars One” organization and its plan to build a colony one piece at a time by sending up small groups of people every 2 years. Although critique of this or any model can focus on a number of predominantly engineering-focused areas, from propulsion technologies to habitat design, the present paper uses a human factors perspective to evaluate the Mars One approach. This critique also presents a more theoretically sound model, the Seed Colony Model (SCM), and, using existing literature, outlines how this approach has advantages for future colonization missions that highlights the human element. Specifically, a variety of potential psychosocial issues for a colonization mission are explored. These include territoriality caused by an individual experiencing ownership of some aspect of their environment, in-group/out-group mentality due to social constructs, conflict escalation, the lack of a “finish line,” and self-selection. All issues are examined in the context of a permanent, sustainable colony. Because human space operations have been limited to smaller groups and had the capability to return to Earth in case of medical emergencies, these previous spaceflight missions are not an accurate representation of the social aspects of a Mars colonization mission. To better represent the conditions, the current paper focuses on experiences from Antarctic missions, where larger teams spend a winter-over in that hostile environment with very limited opportunities for re-supply or extraction. Although colonization missions are in the distant future, this paper aims to develop the theory to support the need for human-centric design considerations for these missions. The SCM, when employed for mission planning, will provide an over-arching system architecture to improve mission success rates. This model is designed around the interactions and complexities of a team, and individual differences in crewmembers, and injects decades of research in the behavioral sciences into the plan to send humans to live on another planet.