Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon, met with University of Houston space architecture students on October 12 to hear their plans for establishing human settlements on Mars.
Space architecture graduate students Suzana Blanco, Kyle Kesling and Taylor Phillips-Hungerford presented their project to the space legend at the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA), home to the world’s only space architecture master’s program.
The group’s presentation focused on Orbital and Surface Integrated Systems, or OASIS, and how those systems would be used to colonize Mars. The team utilized the Aldrin Mars Cycler, a spacecraft conceptualized by Aldrin to send human missions to the red planet.
Aldrin’s son, Andrew Aldrin, president of Moon Express, Inc., attended the presentation, along with former NASA astronaut Bonnie J. Dunbar and Ondrej Doule, assistant professor in the Human-Centered Design Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology.
View photos of the space architects’ presentation to Buzz Aldrin at https://www.flickr.com/photos/cullencollege/sets/72157673971059442/with/30387113605/.