'Mars Ice Home': Team Chips Away at Off-Earth House's Design

"Ice Home is more than just a habitat, since what we really need is a new home on Mars," said Ice Home principal investigator Kevin Kempton, of NASA's Langley Research Center. Ice Home is a deployable Mars habitat concept based on an inflatable structure that makes use of water ice on the Red Planet. An added biological bonus, according to Ice Home advocates, is that water ice serves as shielding from galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), which have been flagged as potentially dangerous to human health o