It’s been a while since we last sent a newsletter. We’ve been busy moving forward with our biggest project yet: Building A Martian House. We’ve taken a break from our hair salon Total Eclipse of the Head, and are working on just one project.

Building A Martian House is an aim to do just that. We are creating a real life house that you can step into and imagine how we might live on another planet.

A few years ago we started to look at what research is happening for humans next big endeavour to live on Mars. There are lots of projects around the world practicing life on Mars to get ready for a real mission. We wanted to contribute to this field of research and build our own Martian House. It’s often said we have more technology in our pockets nowadays than took NASA to the moon. The project is about seeing what is possible to make and achieve with the same spirit of optimism, possibility and collective endeavour – looking at how far we can get with what we have here and now.

Over the years we’ve met a brilliant group of scientists, engineers and architects excited about the idea. By working with people who are leaders in their fields we will make something that is scientifically accurate. The most important thing about the project is that it involves people coming together around an idea. That means we’d like everyone including you to be involved.

OUR NEW FACEBOOK PAGE
After 4 years of working on Building A Martian House we’ve only just made this page. We’d love a few more followers, so please like the page and share it. We will be posting regular updates here, so it’s a quick way to keep up with the project.

Last year we ran workshops and talks with a massive variety of people, from school children to rocket scientists. To find out more in depth about this process visit our blog. We were in We The Curious as well at University of Bristol and University of the West of England. Conversations were documented by illustrator Andy Council, we then worked with Hugh Broughton Architects, as well as engineers and scientists to take everyone’s ideas into account and create the first set of conceptual designs for our Martian House.

Here they are!!!

Here’s a few images from some of our workshops that informed this design. We were funded by The Brigstow Institute, The Global MBR Space Settlement Challenge Grant and The Edward Marshall Trust.

We currently have an exhibition in We The Curious, (Bristol) until 10th November. We are running drop in workshops for children tomorrow (Thursday 22nd August) and Bank Holiday Monday (26th August) from 10am til 3pm. Workshops are suitable for children and families. We’re exploring some of the engineering ideas and making terrariums to take home. There will be more workshops in October – join the Facebook group for updates.

We have an intern – he is designing workshops about the projects engineering challenges, for sixth form students. The results of these workshops will be fed back into the project.

We have a new website that we’re very pleased with – ellaandnicki.com.

GET IN TOUCH IF YOU WANT US TO VISIT YOU!

We have lots of new workshops on offer – if you are a school and wish to have a workshop let us know.

Please also let us know if you want us to visit you for a talk – we love doing this! Maybe we already gave a talk at your event, group, or ran a workshop in your school. We can always drop in and give you all an update in person. We’ve given talks from space science conferences in Washington to people’s living rooms and we always like meeting new people – that is what the project is all about.

Bye for now,

Ella & Nicki