The Martian Mindset

Cluster of Excellence The Martian Mindset

A Scarcity-Driven Engineering Paradigm

Scarcity of resources is rapidly becoming a key challenge for humankind. Accordingly, many research efforts worldwide are focused on achieving a more sustainable, efficient and automated production. In our Cluster, we take a radically new perspective, aiming at a long-term paradigm shift. We place ourselves on Mars, a potentially habitable but inhospitable world, without fossil fuels or extensive water resources and surrounded by a thin CO2 atmosphere. We embrace these extreme boundary conditions to develop the Martian Mindset as a new, scarcity-driven paradigm for the production of enough-to-use materials and parts.

The Cluster 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. It builds upon the decades-long scientific excellence of the University of Bremen and its partner institutes in the fields of materials, processes, production, robotics and space engineering.  

Research

The Martian Mindset is guided by scarcity constraints in four dimensions—natural resources, electric power, human workforce, and information. The research focuses on the sourcing of materials, the processing to parts and the design of operating concepts. We pursue three main goals: (1) develop (bio-)electrochemical methods for the synthesis of raw materials from low-grade resources; (2) design and demonstrate low-energy process chains that use these raw materials as input to produce a variety of enough-to-use parts; and (3) devise concepts for production facilities jointly operated by human-robot teams and supported by digital representations of the processes and production.