> Reports should be in pdf form and use 12 point Times typestyle, 1” margins.
A 20-page report at 12-point font isn't very much- an average college student has likely prepared longer papers. It sounds implausible that one could pack enough detail into that to make a substantial and novel case for a Martian colony design.
Given the paper parameters and this strong hinting, I suspect they’re going to attract a lot of very handwavy and not very serious papers.
For example, one of the requirements is to make steel on Mars. (Why you would do this with only 1000 people, it doesn’t say.) No one wants to say, that we’ll have humans strip mining iron ore (we don’t even know where such veins exist), so someone will say something about 3D printing up a robot smelter that collects iron from dust in the wind, and spits out I-beams that are a special Martian alloy that makes shipping them back to Earth via a railgun cost effective.
Just picturing this is great, sounds like a winning proposal to me.