PDSCorp - About/Services - PLANETARY DEVELOPMENT SYSTEMS CORPORATION

Our History

Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2013.
Raised in College Station, Texas between 2014-2016.
Established in Amarillo, Texas on January 1st, 2017.
Relocated to Houston, Texas on June 7, 2018.

As one can see in the movie still below from Prometheus (2012), this is where it all began. In the background there is a domed city and one is forced to wonder what kind of land use pattern could be placed under that dome that still makes efficient use of the land for development while maintaining self sufficiency. Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities from the 19th century come to mind when it comes to circular and efficient land use patterns. The combination of these two concepts could help achieve what Elon Musk wants, which is a self sustaining city on Mars and eventually beyond. The ultimate goal is to push mankind towards making life multi-planetary and from there the term Exoplanning was born. In particular, exoplanning is a conglomeration of urban planning, aerospace engineering, civil engineering, and various other kinds of sciences and engineering. Bottom line, if mankind is to strive for something greater then they should stop continuing to do the same thing of putting all of their eggs in one basket, better known as Earth.

2012 Copyright 20th Century Fox

Preliminary Development Designs

Better known as Phase I Variant II, a now obsolete design, this urban design pattern and structure were the initial concepts created to capture the mind and put forth the idea of a functional city that can survive and be self-sufficient in the long run. Sadly, these are just to-scale visualizations and they not properly engineered. Below is a gallery of screenshots from the model of the development. To note the infrastructure is designed to work around any gravity type, whether it be heavier (to a certain tolerance) or in more instances lighter than our own, it just does not address changing the gravity to our own normal environment because the technology is just not there yet... As for the next series of designs they will be accurate and engineered for their future hostile environments.

The concept model (Phase I Variant II) being made between June 2015 and February 2016, not representative of construction procedures. As one can see the model gets its rough edges smoothed and the model slowly becomes more accurate as new information is found or calculated, but this variant was ultimately replaced.

The Masters Paper that propelled us forward

In the Master of Urban Planning (MUP) program at Texas A&M University, one is required to write a final masters paper to meet graduation requirements. Under the direction of committee members Dr. Shannon Van Zandt, Dr. Gregory Chamitoff, and Dr. Elise Bright including one ex-officio member Dr. George James III of NASA, this paper came to fruition. It was written and prepared between December 2015 and February 2016, the paper was successfully defended on March 29, 2016. The city designed in the paper below is all based on existing and proven technologies (except the Sabatier reactor, which is scaled up from current functional prototype ones).

(Below is the March 2016 version of the Paper & PowerPoint, click on the images to find the PDFs)
Editor's Note: The simulation in the author's opinion is the weakest point in the paper since there was a crunch for time.

The 2016 PowerPoint

2020 Mars City Design Submittal

This document below was submitted to The Mars Society's International Design Contest for a 1 million person city state on June 30, 2020. Capped at only 20 pages per contest guidelines and a few other required (off)topics, it will describe a Phase I Variant V type and most of its valuable assets that will set it apart from the competition. As many as you know, this design is still a work in progress and we have come a long way since 2013. This is another step in our journey and we will continue to improve the design moving forward as new knowledge becomes available.

UPDATE: Contest placement details were not made available after the contest once the Top 20 were announced, thus we can assume we finished somewhere between 21st and 175th place. Much as the last two sentences in the paragraph above state these designs are still a work in progress and with limited resources behind them it will take longer to perfect.