"This self-erecting, ultralight, deployable Geodesic Dome takes Buckminster Fuller’s ideas into the new Millenium. Desert Snowflake, the winner of the people’s votes, is an ode to architectural origami form. It showcases the value of flexible, lightweight yet highly-robust construction systems paramount for extraterrestrial colonisation. The spore-like structure has been designed with adaptability and modularity in mind, allowing for continued growth of the Martian colony in time."

The habitat would land inside a crater 900m in diameter in the Deuteronilus Mensae region on Mars, where the geomorphology indicates large volumes of water ice in the regolith for many hundreds of kilometers abroad. The habitat would auto-erect on the dune field at the bottom of the crater and utilize a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator for power and heating.

The habitat would be a deployable geodesic dome with a tensegrity configuration and an origami deployable membrane for an expandable inflatable interior. The ultralight deployable tensegrity endoskeleton would allow the structure to bear large loads such as hanging infrastructure and ISRU radiation shielding that an inflatable alone couldn’t. Three of these habitats each capable of deploying to 37.5m in diameter could be stowed inside a single fairing of a Falcon 9 rocket for transport. (SpaceX’s BFR would increase the max dome size to 67.5m) After landing the dome would auto-erect by pulling the dome’s tensile members, tendons, taught with a set of embedded servos that would guide and lock the rigid compressive members, struts made of telescoping tubes, into place, giving the dome a 12.5m diameter ready for inflation. The dome would then seal its three doors and slowly inflate with breathable air at 1atm of pressure using the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Equipment, MOXIE, on board, giving the dome its spore-like shape.