One of the biggest challenges for a future Mars colony is metals. Shipping them from Earth is prohibitively expensive, and Martian soil isn't rich in the needed resources. A new paper (Suriano et al.) proposes an alternative: a supply chain where metals are extracted from asteroids and delivered to Mars.
The authors selected metallic asteroids reachable by current spacecraft — with ΔV within practical limits. For return trips, they considered producing propellant directly on carbonaceous asteroids, removing the dependency on Earth-based refueling.
Different supply chain configurations were optimized across three objectives simultaneously: mission ΔV, mass of extracted metals, and mass of propellant produced on-site. For each scenario, the team built visit schedules and estimated total delivered material at various mining rates.
Finally, the authors discuss using the delivered metals on the Martian surface — for additive manufacturing (3D printing) of habitats and rovers.
The study is purely engineering — no science fiction. All calculations are grounded in existing space transportation technologies and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) methods.