I watched Armageddon again fairly recently with Bruce Willis, oil drillers in space and an asteroid the size of Texas bearing down on Earth. Buried beneath the Hollywood chaos is a genuinely interesting question, what exactly could we do with an asteroid if we got our hands on one? As it turns out, the answer has nothing to do with blowing it up, sorry Bruce but everything to do with building a new world. Building a colony on Mars is not just an engineering problem, it’s a logistics one too. The logistics, unglamorous as it sound, may ultimately determine whether humanity becomes a multi planetary species or stays firmly rooted on Earth. NASA artwork of a potential Mars habitat in conjunction with other surface elements on Mars (Credit : NASA) Think about what a Mars colony actually needs. Not just food and oxygen, but metal. Structural steel for habitats, aluminium for equipment, iron for tools and many of the components will wear out, break, and need replacing.…