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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

SingularityHub [singularityhub.com]:

It doesn’t get much more futuristic than living on Mars—and guess what? There’s a 3D printed home for that, too. In fact, there are a few; last year saw the conclusion of a contest held by NASA called the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge [nasa.gov].
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The top prize ($500,000) went to AI Space Factory [aispacefactory.com], a New York-based architecture and construction technologies company focused on building for space exploration. Their dual-shell, four-level design is called Marsha [aispacefactory.com], and unlike Martian habitats we’ve seen on the big screen or read about in sci-fi novels, it’s neither a dome nor an underground bunker. In fact, it sits fully above ground and it looks like a cross between a hive and a giant egg.

The team chose the hive-egg shape very deliberately, saying that it’s not only optimized to handle the pressure and temperature demands of the Martian atmosphere, but building it with a 3D printer will be easier because the printer won’t have to move around as much as it would to build a structure with a larger footprint. That means less risk of errors and a faster building speed.

The building material would combine basalt fiber and bioplastics made from plants grown on Mars.

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