I guess that building a home on the planet Mars would be the ultimate bug-out experience wouldn’t it? One things for sure, you’ll be out of reach of any (human style) threats at least! I can’t really see that happening to me somehow, but there are things we preppers can learn from NASA’s Martian studies.

NASA has been investigating the possibilities of long term human habitation of Mars and the problems associated with that for many years now as you’re probably aware. One of the major issues of course is what sort of buildings are the colonists going to live in? Sure they’ll be bringing in their own spacecraft and can survive in that for a while, but they’re soon going to need something a bit larger and more permanent. The major criteria would be:

• it must be quick
• it must be easy (they’re astronauts, not builders)
• it must be able to use locally available materials – it’s way to expensive to ship them

Using these criteria, they finally decided on a method called “Earth Bag Construction”. In this method, whatever local soils or even rubble are available are simply packed into bags, and these bags are then used to build structures that are incredibly strong and very easy and quick to erect.

Earth bag construction isn’t that new an idea, it’s been around since the 1980’s, but it’s now really starting to catch on, and it has many advantages that make it very suitable for building wilderness dwellings. Read about 7 of them over the next page…

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