The people behind Exspatialis.

James is the founder and sole developer of Exspatialis — the first publically available geographic information system built for the surface of Mars. He designed and built the entire platform end to end: the 3D globe engine, the scientific data pipelines, the sector-analysis and mission-planning tools, and the cloud infrastructure behind them.

Exspatialis unifies decades of scattered Mars science — elevation, imagery, water and ice, in-situ resources, radiation, and terrain hazards — into a single planning surface, so researchers, educators, engineers and mission planners can all work from the same map.

James comes to Mars from architecture. He holds a Master of Architecture from Griffith University — awarded the Griffith Award for Academic Excellence in his final year (2017) — and brings 12+ years across residential, commercial, high-rise, mixed-use and master-planned developments, including a decade running his own consultancy. It is the same discipline Exspatialis applies to the red planet: site selection, terrain and constraint analysis, master planning, and sequencing construction across a landscape. Not a formally trained developer, he is a self-taught engineer — C++ for Arduino systems (lighting, and hydroponic and aquaponic monitoring driven by a long-standing interest in vertical farming and off-world settlement) and Python for web, automation and data tooling. Exspatialis began after university: setting out to enter a Mars Society colony-design competition, he went looking for the right site to build on — and found the contextual Martian data he needed scattered across NASA websites and droves of raw datasets. Pulling it all into one place became the seed of the platform.