We've planned the first settlement.
A single bounded area of Acidalia Planitia, Mars — sited on purpose where no rover, lander, heritage site, or published private landing zone has any prior interest. It isn't a blank grid: it's a garden-suburb settlement plan drawn over the real Martian surface — a central diamond spaceport, a civic green at its heart, boulevards carrying power & utility easements, and homestead long-lots of 40 acres each woven between parks, greens and ice ponds. Roughly a fifth of the tract is public open space, and every road bends around the craters — which keep their real Martian names. Zoom in over the actual terrain and stake an open lot.
An honest first claim — no other interested parties
The strongest good-faith homestead claim is one nobody else is contesting. So the founding tract sits in the open northern lowlands of Acidalia Planitia — flat, with shallow ground ice within reach — and well away from every government mission site and every private candidate-landing cluster. It's laid out the way a good town is: streets that bend around the natural craters, a fifth of the ground kept as parks and commons, and homesteads gathered into neighbourhoods rather than a bare checkerboard.
Each homestead lot is a 40-acre long-lot — a 2:1 rectangle, ≈569 × 285 m. A diamond spaceport core sits inside Founders' Green, the civic commons; boulevards carry the power & utility easements; the natural craters are kept as reserves with a rim drive circling each, so no road runs through one. Rights-of-way, the commons, the parks and the crater reserves are dedicated and not claimable — every numbered homestead or commercial lot is a full 40 acres.
File your claim over the real surface
This is where you stake your homestead. The plat is drawn over real NASA Mars imagery, so you're choosing over the actual Acidalia terrain. Start at the whole tract; click (or double-click) to zoom from quarters → districts → sections → lots, then click an open lot to stake it — it turns green. Gold lots are commercial / depot frontage; parchment lots are residential long-lots; grey lots are already claimed in the registry. The rust diamond is the reserved spaceport inside Founders' Green; the parks and ice ponds are public open space; and the craters keep their real Martian names, each circled by a rim drive so the roads bend around them. Use the mini-map and breadcrumb to keep your bearings.
👆 Each lot is a 40-acre homestead long-lot. Click open lots to stake them — stake adjacent lots to build a larger holding, or grab a commercial frontage lot on a boulevard.
Base imagery: NASA/JPL/USGS Mars Viking MDIM21 colour mosaic (≈232 m/px) — the real Acidalia surface. At the deepest zoom, where the global mosaic runs out of native resolution, a light cartographic micro-relief is added so each plot reads as its own ground; it is illustrative, not photographic.
Crater names (Lomonosov, Kunowsky, Skłodowska, Aranda, Bamberg, Bordeaux, Gasa, Liberta, Cádiz) are real Martian crater names from the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature — most from the Mare Acidalium quadrangle that contains Acidalia Planitia (large craters named for scientists, small craters for Earth towns). Their placement on this planned tract is cartographic, not a georeferenced survey of those specific craters.
The plat is a survey diagram (claim-file instrument #1 — Plat of Survey, and #10 — Metes-and-Bounds Description), not a photograph and not a legal title. The garden-suburb plan — spaceport core, Founders' Green, parks, ice ponds, boulevards, crater reserves with their rim drives, and the section/district grid carrying the power & utility easements — models real homestead and town-site survey practice; the core, the commons, the parks, the crater reserves and all rights-of-way are reserved and not claimable. Roughly a fifth of the tract is dedicated public open space.
Stake your forty in the founding tract
Pick an open 40-acre lot, then add your details and signature on one page and pay $39. Your claim file arrives by email as a PDF. A documented good-faith homestead claim and a collectible. No title to land is conveyed, and it is not an investment.
Back to the plat → Give one as a gift