Martian Mindset Seminar
Humans living on Mars has been a longtime dream which may now appear within reach. The technological, ethical and environmental challenges are however enormous and require transdisciplinary, ground-breaking science.
The Martian Mindset is a scarcity-driven paradigm for producing enough-to-use materials and parts. By imagining engineering on Mars—with no fossil fuels, scarce water, and a thin CO₂ atmosphere—the Cluster Team rethinks production from scratch and redefines manufacturing for Earth and beyond.
Join our regular Martian Mindset Seminar to explore a sustainable Mars Exploration for the benefit of humankind and Earth.
Every 2nd Thursday at 1.15 pm,
AIB (Hochschulring 40)
Winter Term 2026/27:Starting at October 22nd
Online Participation possible, for details please see the event announcement.
The Cluster The Martian Mindset is funded by the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) from 2026 to 2032 through the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments.
Upcoming Events
05. November 2026−05. November 2027
Past Events
Psychological Challenges and Collaboration in Long-Duration Spaceflight
with Vera Hagemann - 09.07.2026 | 2:15 p.m.
The Cluster’s very own psychologist Vera Hagemann held her Seminar on the psychology of spaceflight. Within the Martian Mindset, she is researching the interaction between humans and robots. But her talk placed focus elsewhere: the psychological difficulties of being an astronaut on a long mission and what can be done to minimize their hardship.
On a mission to space or another planet, the crew must face isolation from their loved ones, follow a strict schedule full of hard work and constant sleep difficulties. In addition, astronauts traveling to Mars will be so far from home that they also have to deal with delayed communication. With messages taking 20min to reach Earth, the team will be left alone to make critical decisions based on incredibly little information.
Thanks to analog missions, Vera – along with other researchers – has completed multiple studies on how crews can best handle these burdens. Her work has proven the importance of job autonomy, good collaboration, flow of information and clear goals to keep the astronauts as healthy and motivated as possible.
Dr. Vera Hagemann is a professor of business psychology and human resources at the University of Bremen and editor of the journal “Research for People in Organizations”. As part of the Martian Mindset Cluster of Excellence, she and her team conduct research on human-agent teaming. Recognizing that human factors are essential in high-risk environments, she also founded the German Association for Human Factors in Emergency and serves as its vice president. Her research focuses on high-responsibility teams, team training, debriefing, and human-agent/AI teaming.
MELiSSA - Regenerative Life Support for Humans in Space
with Francesc Gòdia Casablancas – 25.06.2026 | 2:15 p.m.
In his talk, the bioengineer Francesc Gòdia Casablancas gave insight into a project that has been bringing scientists together for decades.
In a big part funded by the European Space Agency, MELiSSA stands for Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative. For thirty years now, researchers from around fifty institutes, universities, and companies have been working together on one shared goal: to create a life-support system that works as a closed loop. If you want to leave the Earth for an extended period of time, you are faced with two options: either you regularly get supplies from the ground, as is the case with the ISS - or sustain yourself without any help.
In this approach, every single breath an astronaut takes and any byproduct of their body is fed back into the loop. The system contains algae, plants and a number of bacteria that are all in place to sustain one another. Through their work, the scientists at MELiSSA aim to enable a crew on Mars to have water, food and breathable air without any support from their home planet.
Francesc Gòdia has been a full Professor of Chemical Engineering at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) since 1993, with teaching activities in Biotechnology. His research is on Regenerative Life Support Systems in Space for human long-term missions and Animal Cell Technology to produce biopharmaceuticals, recombinant vaccines and vectors for gene therapy. Gòdia is overall Manager of the MELiSSA Pilot Plant, President of the European Federation of Biotechnology and chair of the Executive Board of the European Society for the Advancement of Cell Technology.
The Role of Space Law: Bridging Governance, Al, Ethics, and Sustainability Beyond Earth
with Lesley Jane Smith – 11.06.2026 | 2:15 p.m.
The rapid evolution of space activities in the new Millenium require looking at existing space treaties through a new lens. Never before have legal systems had to deal with the entry of commercial space enterprises, an increase in automated systems relying on artificial intelligence or plans for human life beyond Earth.
Generally, the five UN space treaties provide the fundamental framework for the peaceful use and exploration of outer space. She pleads the case for them simply having to be implemented well in the face of new challenges instead of being thrown aside as outdated.
That also applies to topics which are entirely new to legislation, like potential human settlement beyond Earth or when it comes to AI with its unanswered questions of liability and responsibility. Further, so Smith, a legal framework for the commercial use of space is desperately needed with such activities on the horizon.
The environmental impact of space flight brings the next problem: how do you combine the harmful impact of spaceflight with the absolutely necessary environmental data it collects? Smith proposes making the data universally available, possibly by having it recognized as a Common Heritage of Mankind, to limit the amount of flights taken.
Lesley Jane Smith, graduate of Edinburgh University and solicitor, is partner and legal advisor in Weber-Steinhaus & Smith, Bremen and Professor Emeritus of Law at Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Lower Saxony. Lesley Jane is an expert in the field of national regional and international space law and policy, collaborating with its stakeholders at industrial and agency level. She was appointed President of the International Institute of Space Law (IISL) in October 2025.
Assessment of a very high-power cargo transportation system to Mars
With Massimiliano Vasile - 28.05.2026 | 2:15 pm
The aerospace engineer Massimiliano Vasile held his seminar on the practical challenges of getting to Mars and how a spaceship might be optimize to face them. To do that sort of modeling, he analyzed the balance between flight times, total mission duration, Mars stay times, planetary alignment, dry masses and engine size, as well as mission paths.
In his talk, he explained a paper he, alongside other researchers from the Aerospace Centre of Excellence in Glasgow, published in 2021. They were tasked by the European Space Agency to work out a way to get at least 50 tons of cargo and a crew of three to Mars and back, all based on nuclear propulsion. Through their modeling, they found a list of challenges such a mission would have to face. It would be a race against time, a fight against radiation and a balanced trade-off between size and weight of the ship and it’s travel time.
Massimiliano Vasile is currently Professor of Space Systems Engineering and Director of the Aerospace Centre of Excellence at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. He received his M.S. in 1996 and Ph.D. in 2001 from Politecnico di Milano. Prof. Vasile has developed novel numerical methods for optimization under uncertainty, has pioneered the use of computational intelligence in astrodynamics, and the use of imprecise probability theories in the optimization of space systems.
From Mars to Earth – How the Search for Martian Life Could Reveal Our Own Origins
With Jacob Heinz - 30.04.2026 | 2.15 pm
The astrobiologist Jacob Heinz is on the search for microbial life on Mars – but not only that: he proposes that if organisms exist up there, they might have the same roots as life on Earth does.
Heinz explained that Mars’ environment used to be much friendlier towards living beings, with water covering the planet, which it lost as it’s crust developed. But still: our red neighbour had about a 100 million year headstart in habitability. The options now left for microbes on Mars would be water deep beneath the surface, which has never been studied, or salty brines. And this is where Jacob Heinz’ research comes in.
He is an expert in microbes that live in extremely salty environments. By seeing how specific species fare in exceptionally high concentrations of salts and studying life in analogue habitats like the Atacama desert, he is exploring what microbial life on Mars might potentially look like.
Since 2020, he has conducted postdoctoral research at IGB and TU Berlin, where he led the DFG-funded BRINES project, focusing on the formation of Martian brines and their microbial habitability. Since October 2025, Jacob has served as a Postdoc at ZARM, University of Bremen, directing the EXOSALT project to investigate hypersaline environments, such as the Atacama Desert, as potential Mars-analogue habitats.
Mars and the Earthlings–The Story Continues
With Michel Viso - 16.04.2026 | 2:15 pm
To kick off our Seminar Series, the veterinarian-turned-cosmonaut Michel Viso explained the challenges standing at the very core of any mission to Mars. Whether that means the strikingly powerful Dust Storms, access to water, or the incredible technical and physical accomplishment of getting there in the first place.
But a number of complications already arise here on Earth, long before any shuttle actually leaves the planet. Here, issues like politics, budget cuts, or mere mismanagement can – and have - hindered successful missions.
With all the facts laid out, he looked at the whole picture and asked the question whether Mars could one day become a second home to the human race. Discussions are circulating about establishing colonies on the red planet or even terraforming it to make it more habitable for our species. But for Viso, there is a clear answer to these visions of the future: there is no planet B.
After several years of practice as a veterinarian across France, Michel Viso was selected as a cosmonaut in 1985 by the French Space Agency. He worked on a project developed jointly by France and the United States and was meant to embark on space shuttle flights. The program was cancelled in 1993. Michel Viso did not fly into space. He became a programme scientist for general biology and animal physiology. In 1999, he was appointed CNES representative for planetary protection policy and later programme scientist of the Exobiology and Exoplanets programmes. In 2021 suffering from the incurable age limit disease, he retired from CNES. Two year slater, he joined the European Space Science Committee.