These carbon fibre chairs are designed to be used on Mars

If Elon Musk wants to get a human crew to Mars by 2024, they'll need chairs, right?

That's the priority for Switzerland-based designer Thomas Missé, who has designed the "Mars Chair" with interplanetary colonisation in mind.

"Before industries get set up in this new home all products will have to be imported from earth," says Missé on his website. "This will be a drastic change in the way we look at the production: transportation will represent most of the cost."

Missé has designed the lightweight, carbon fibre chair with the optimisation of space and cost in mind — his team has estimated that furniture transportation to Mars would cost around 5000€ ($5899.75) per kilogram.

"This approach allows to save around 7000€ per Mars Chair as well as 75 percent of the packed volume compared to an average stackable chair."

Missé has created each chair with a weight of just 500g on Earth, with eight-degree angled legs for "better stability in low gravity." Plus, it's only 2mm thick, so can be stacked effectively within a ship — storage volume, according to Missé, is a key hurdle.

The key to the chair's lightweight frame is the use of carbon fibre.

"Carbon fibre is usually an expensive material, however in this context its ratio between weight and strength will make it a cheap alternative to most furniture’s materials," says Missé on his website.

While there's a considerable amount to worry about before we figure out where to sit on Mars, at least some designers are considering the more practical, domestic aspects of colonising another planet.

"This product is a small step closer to Mars but aim to set up the ground base of a way of thinking about the production implication of the early stage of space colonisation," said Missé.

[h/t Dezeen]