Cosmic Robotics Puts Up a Roadmap to Build a City on Mars

Cosmic Robotics, doing autonomous construction on Earth and beyond, led by James Emerick and Lewis Jones, has put up a roadmap to build a city on Mars.

Cosmic Robotics’ mission is to enable the construction of a city on Mars. The company was founded in 2024 with the view that while rockets could enable human and cargo transport to Mars by the mid-2030s, several technologies still need to mature for a sustained human presence. One major challenge is providing the labor needed to build and operate infrastructure on Mars.

A self-sustaining Martian city would need to handle agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and maintenance. SpaceX estimates that around one million people may be needed to support these functions, with plans to launch 1,000 Starships every 26 months for 20 years to reach that population.

While SpaceX is scaling its manufacturing accordingly, reaching one million inhabitants remains a highly ambitious target. Cosmic Robotics believes the bigger bottleneck is reducing the number of people required for a self-sustaining Mars settlement. Technologies that can automate critical tasks and lower the minimum viable population could therefore accelerate the path to self-sufficiency.

Cosmic Robotics was founded with the goal of enabling a self-sufficient Martian city with around 10,000 citizens rather than one million. Achieving this would require a dramatic increase in worker productivity, allowing the initial crew to deploy much of the infrastructure before the larger population arrives.

The company acknowledges that this is an ambitious target. Even SpaceX, with around 14,000 employees and extensive vertical integration, still relies on external systems for resources such as metals, propellant, and food. Achieving true self-sufficiency on Mars would therefore require a far greater level of automation and productivity.

Cosmic Robotics says advances in AI, particularly Physical AI, have significantly improved the outlook for automating construction and maintenance on Mars. The company now believes autonomous robots could be ready for Martian city construction by the mid-2030s and has identified four key technology layers:

• Layer 0 — Hardware: 300 kW-class, fully electric construction-scale robots.

• Layer 1 — Controller: Safe, adaptive, high-frequency robot control systems.

• Layer 2 — Operator: Advanced reasoning AI running at the edge.

• Layer 3 — Orchestrator: City-scale AI agents coordinating construction activities.

Cosmic Robotics has focused initially on its hardware and control systems to enable supervised autonomy on terrestrial construction sites and collect operational data. Its Cosmic-1 robot has achieved twice the labor productivity of manual methods in solar farm construction.

The company is now accelerating development of its AI layers to expand into other construction applications and increase productivity. In 2025, Cosmic Robotics became the first company to receive a NASA contract to develop edge-reasoning vision-language models for in-space and lunar applications. It has also launched Constellation, a jobsite planning and mission-control platform designed to coordinate field operations through AI agents. With recent advances in reasoning models, the company believes city-scale construction coordination is now primarily an engineering challenge rather than a frontier research problem.

Layer 0 — Hardware: 300 kW-class electric construction robots

Construction today relies heavily on diesel-powered hydraulic equipment, which would be difficult to operate on Mars due to its thin atmosphere and the challenges of storing both fuel and oxidizer. Long-term operation would also demand equipment with minimal maintenance requirements.

Simply converting existing machinery to electric power is not enough. Construction-scale batteries, power electronics, and actuators capable of handling peak loads of up to 300 kW are still largely undeveloped at scale.

Cosmic Robotics believes electric construction equipment and new classes of robots capable of fine manipulation will be necessary for Mars, and increasingly valuable on Earth. Electrification is already advancing across aerospace and automotive industries, while construction faces growing labor shortages, particularly in skilled trades such as electrical and plumbing work. These trends could create demand for construction robots well before they are deployed on Mars.

Layer 1 — Controller: Safe and adaptive high-frequency robot control

Current robotics sits between two approaches: traditional industrial controllers that follow fixed, preprogrammed motions, and newer VLA and World Action Models that can adapt to changing environments but lack the safety, transparency, and debugging needed for large-scale real-world deployment.

Cosmic Robotics aims to bridge this gap with a high-frequency controller built around two components:

• Safety critic: A transparent, real-time system for collision detection and safety checks, drawing on technologies developed for autonomous vehicles.

• Adaptive actor: A learned policy that generates robot actions and adapts to changing conditions.
  

The company plans to initially focus on construction tasks that can be handled through Model Predictive Control and other optimization techniques while collecting the real-world data needed to train more general-purpose policies and close the sim-to-real gap.

Layer 2 — Operator: Advanced reasoning AI on the edge

Layer 1 handles real-time task execution, but a higher-level reasoning system is needed to prioritize, schedule, and adapt tasks as conditions change. Cosmic Robotics calls this the AI Operator, a system that understands the robot and surrounding environment while coordinating with people and other robots.

The company believes current frontier models are already capable of supporting this layer. The focus is now on distilling these capabilities into smaller models suitable for edge computing and building the software tools needed to let AI systems manage physical equipment.

Layer 3 — Orchestrator: City-scale construction coordination AI

Construction sites rely heavily on supervisors, project managers, and support staff for planning, logistics, resource allocation, environmental monitoring, maintenance, and engineering. On Mars, communication delays of up to 22 minutes each way would make real-time coordination with Earth impractical.

Cosmic Robotics aims to use AI agents to automate and coordinate these functions, targeting at least a 10× productivity improvement for support crews. Similar to the AI Operator layer, the company believes current reasoning models are already capable, or close to capable, of handling this role with the right software tools and infrastructure.

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