How do you make a base on Mars? Simple: you send some bacteria to the red planet and you let them mine iron. After a couple of years you send in human settlers who use the iron to construct a base. That, in a nutshell, is the proposal of PhD candidate Benjamin Lehner of Delft University of Technology. Together with Delft colleagues and researchers from the space agencies ESA and NASA, Lehner has worked on an extensive plan for an unmanned mission utilizing bacteria for the past four years. On Friday the 22nd of November, he will defend his PhD thesis at TU Delft. Read the article