Mars 2018

Mars18 was a team based at the University of Stuttgart (Germany) founded by myself in 2013 to participate in the International Mars Society Inspiration Mars Student Design Contest. The team consisted of about 25 members with sub-teams dedicated to working on all aspects of a space mission aiming at a manned Mars fly-by launching in the year 2018. My technical resposibilities were systems engineering and structures.

We managed to source significant support from different University entities (Institute for Space System, Friends and Supporters of the University of Stuttgart) as well as private entities (Astos Solutions, Airbus Defence and Space, Brainlight GmbH, Hackerspace Shackspace in Stuttgart, Red Bull). We also got a decent amount of attention from local media when we made it into the finals as one of ten teams out of 38 teams representing 56 universities in 15 countries.

In August 2014, 13 members of the team travelled to the final event in Houston, Texas, where I presented our final mission concept and managed to achieve 5th place overall. Thus making us the only non-US team to place in the top five, receiving a trophy and a price: Mars Society announcenment of final results The final presentation we gave in Houston can be downloaded under this link: Mars18 final presentation

A summary of our concept was also published and presented at the peer-reviewed IEEE Aerospace Conference 2015. A copy of the paper can be found here: Mars18 published paper

Finally, the (pretty sweet) mission video we made can be found on YouTube: Mars18 Mission Video