Meet the man working with NASA to 3D print a colony on Mars

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(CNN)Forget the moon. The next giant leap for mankind could be building a habitat on Mars.

The fourth planet from the sun may be cold — Martian winters can reach -190 degrees Fahrenheit (-87 degrees Celsius) — full of deserts and lacking in oxygen, but for Behrokh Khoshnevis it’s humans’ next destination.

The pioneering professor in engineering at the University of Southern California has been working with NASA on the possibility of building a colony on Mars since 2011.

In 2004, Khoshnevis unveiled a revolutionary 3D-printing method dubbed Contour Crafting (CC), which made it possible to print a 2,500-square-foot building in less than a day on Earth.

Then, in 2016 he took first prize in the NASA In-Situ Materials Challenge, for Selective Separation Sintering — a 3D-printing process that makes use of powder-like materials found on Mars and works in zero-gravity conditions.

Here, Khoshnevis tells CNN why he believes humans will soon build on Mars.

You’re not the first person to suggest building on Mars. What makes your plans better?

When I read about the moon and Mars — the conditions, the habitats — I realized that almost all of the existing ideas involved taking materials and components from Earth and building with those materials. Taking 1 kilogram of material from Earth to the moon would cost hundreds of thousands dollars. It was clear to me that these ideas were not economically viable.

Other approaches, like taking inflatables, also wouldn’t work. Inflatables are made of polymeric material, like vinyl, so they won’t survive long because the radiation on Mars is pretty intense. Radiation is the enemy of polymers, causing it to become weak and fragile.

One reason that NASA and the European Space Agencies are paying attention is that there are more capable rockets that can take bigger payloads and can do more serious work there.

Commercial interest and space tourism is becoming serious, too. Remember that there are people who will pay $10 million per trip to go on a space shuttle, revolve around the earth, and look at the universe from space shuttles.

But wait — Mars isn’t hospitable for humans. Is it realistic to think we can ever live there?

I think that it’s a hard initiative but humans are very capable. It’s about making it a priority of governments, commercial entities, scientists — it all depends on how many people work on it in parallel, right?

One hundred years ago … no one imagined that 300 people would be sitting in a metallic airplane going from one side of the world to the other in a few hours.

It’s hard to imagine what we will have 100 years from now, or 50 years from now.

But I have full confidence that we will conquer Mars and this solar system, and even beyond.

This interview has been edited for brevity.

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