It has been more than 50 years since humans last went for a test drive, took a stroll and then had a hasty, somewhat unappetising lunch on the Moon.
The menu on Apollo 17 was limited. Along with what Nasa described as “nutrient-defined food sticks”, there was chicken and rice, a butterscotch pudding with biscuits and instant coffee, tea, cocoa or lemonade.
The three-man crew spent just 72 hours gazing at the Earth from the surface of the Moon before they took off for home. They left their battery-powered Moon buggy behind, as well as the detritus of various scientific experiments that they carried out during their stay, and an assortment of litter.
“A long and very expensive camping trip”, Xavier de Kestelier calls it now. The London-based architect is leading a team working for the European Space Agency (ESA) which has drawn up a very different strategy for life on the Moon. It is a plan for a permanent lunar settlement that would make use of the Moon’s own resources rather than rely on bringing everything up from the Earth.
He is holding out the prospect of a settlement that could enjoy some fresh food, enough room to relax and a sense of community: a community of 144 people living on the Moon.
The world is in the grip of a second space race, this time with many more players, with Russia, India, Japan, China and the US all engaged in lunar projects. On Thursday, a spacecraft built by Intuitive Machines, with funding from Nasa and launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, became the first US-made spacecraft to touchdown on the Moon’s surface in half a century — and the first ever made by a private company. The concept of extraterrestrial design and architecture seems more tangible today than it has for decades.
But designing for life in space has a way of lurching back and forth between speculative fiction and fact. Two years before Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind, Stanley Kubrick had correctly predicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, his 1968 film, the two-stage strategy that Nasa is now following as it plans a way to support permanent settlement on the Moon. Kubrick’s Space Station V in Earth’s orbit had a Hilton Hotel with picturephone booths and groovy Olivier Mourgue Djinn armchairs in the lobby to serve as the gateway to the Clavius Moon base. In one scene Kubrick pictured the crew of the Discovery spaceship using a tablet, more than 40 years before Apple got around to actually making the iPad.
The real Skylab space stations, launched between 1973 and 1974, were much more than a camping trip. Nasa asked Raymond Loewy to help turn the hull of the third stage of a Saturn V rocket into a home in which a three-man crew could live for three months at a time. Loewy, a suave French-born industrial designer who had a way of claiming credit where credit was not necessarily due. He did not design the Coke bottle, as the Loewy Foundation website still suggests. But he was responsible for installing a dining table in Skylab at which the crew could share their meals. Loewy commissioned Syd Mead, a designer who would go on to create the haunted passages of the USS Sulaco, the spaceship in Aliens, to visualise his design.
The Moon is a far more extreme and hostile environment than even its nearest Earth equivalent, an Antarctic base. Without an atmosphere, the Moon offers no protection against radiation or asteroid strikes. “Design becomes really interesting with really harsh restraints,” de Kestelier says.
What makes his approach distinctive is that not everything in his estate on the Moon is going to be brand new and man-made. His strategy mixes engineering with an appreciation of the human dimension, and an interior that could actually feel something like a home. It belongs to the same tradition that saw the inclusion of a window in the Mercury capsules at the insistence of the first generation of American astronauts, who overruled the engineers who believed that a periscope would be adequate.
De Kestelier is one of the many architects and designers captivated by the prospect of life in space. Philippe Starck is another. Best known as a designer of ineffectual lemon squeezers, he is following in Raymond Loewy’s path with his work for Axiom Space, a company that has a contract from Nasa to build the first commercial space station. Initially it will plug into the International Space Station as a living pod and replace it when it is finally decommissioned. Starck describes his design as “an egg in a nest”, offering a womb with quilted walls, studded with colourful LED lights.
“A space station is ruled by a fundamental law: zero gravity,” said Starck when the designs were revealed in 2018. “Unlike terrestrial life constraints, life in space is a multidirectional freedom. My vision is to create a comfortable egg, friendly, where walls are so soft and in harmony with the values of movements of the human body in zero gravity. This dematerialisation shall be a first approach to infinity. The traveller should physically and mentally feel their action of floating in the universe.”
It was a message beguiling enough to persuade Orbite, a start-up space tourism business, to appoint him as the creative director of what it calls its North American campus. It will be built with “a special emphasis on sustainability and innovation, offering cutting-edge training spaces, top-level amenities for extended training and pre-mission quarantine, and immersive areas for individuals to prepare for space travel”. So far its activities have been limited to the offer of a $29,500 per person, four-day course at the Four Seasons Resort in Orlando, complete with microgravity flight and “Michelin star” space food lab tasting event.
De Kestelier has been thinking about how a permanent base on the Moon might really work ever since he was 12, when he saw the interior of the training version of a Soviet Mir space station at an exhibition in Brussels. Even before he studied architecture, he was drawing up his ideas for detailed and serious-looking spacecraft. Later, while working for Norman Foster — himself a space enthusiast since he was charmed by the Dan Dare cartoon in the Eagle magazine as a boy — was involved with a study for a space station on Mars.
In January, de Kestelier’s team at the Hassell architectural practice, in partnership with Cranfield University, and with input from a range of specialists including psychologists and roboticists, completed a master plan to build a permanent lunar settlement for the ESA. Though it spends €7bn a year and maintains an astronaut training centre of its own, the ESA is working with Nasa’s Artemis programme, set up to plan for humans to return to the Moon — and ultimately venture to Mars.
De Kestelier and the team have brought together existing technologies ranging from rocket science to three-dimensional printing — or additive manufacturing, as it is better described — to plan the basis of a way of life on the Moon that might actually be worth living. He has a site on the edge of the Shackleton crater in mind, a spot at the lunar south pole chosen for the most traditional of earthbound architectural reasons: it is unusually sunny and is likely to have access to some kind of water supply. In fact, the presence of water is why this second space race is overwhelmingly targeted at the lunar south pole, as it could be used for hydration and splitting into oxygen, for breathing, and hydrogen, for creating rocket fuel.
De Kestelier is planning to manufacture soft furniture there, using waste plastic to grow mycelium as the raw material. He believes residents will need the psychological reassurance of tactile, natural materials, and would face the storage units with bamboo grown in the solar-powered greenhouse that will form part of the complex. To make for a more palatable diet, he envisages locally sourced crispy lettuce from the same greenhouse, rather than rely on clocking up the massive air miles involved in shipping it from Earth at a cost of something like $200,000 a kilogramme.
A settlement of 144 people living on the Moon for long periods is going to need to find ways to socialise if it is going to become a real community and avoid the potential psychological damage of such extreme isolation. De Kestelier has designed a bar that is full of sly visual references to previous lunar missions. His drawings show armchairs recycled from the 1972 Moon buggy, “so long as it’s not seen as a precious heritage site by the time that we get there”. He suggests that elements of his interiors might include furniture made with parts recycled from the ancient Saturn rockets that the Apollo programme relied on. The drinks behind the bar are in weight-saving bags, not bottles.
Beyond all this whimsy is the hard fact that even the latest generation of rockets will place severe restrictions on how much can be shipped at any one time.
By the standards of Mars, 140mn miles away, the Moon seems a relatively tractable problem at just 240,000 miles away. On Mars, where an electronic command from Earth would take up to 20 minutes to arrive, remote control would be impossible. The first robots there would have to be entirely autonomous. Construction on the Moon would involve robots directed by astronauts, he says.
He envisages that the foundation of the Moon settlement will see a handful of people arrive, perhaps delivered by one of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spacecraft, bringing with them an autonomous life support system that would keep them going for the length of their relatively brief mission. An essential part of their task would be to prepare the site for a permanent settlement.
Maybe not that first crew but the next one, or the one after that, would start to use abundant Moon dust as the raw material to fabricate a protective shell that will shelter later residents from solar radiation. The scientific name for this dust is regolith. It is extremely abrasive, presenting a potential hazard to both human health and to machinery and must be handled with care. De Kestelier’s plan is designed to ensure that the hard shell and the soft-skinned living quarters inside do not touch each other to avoid any contamination.
A cargo rocket would bring teams of lightweight solar-powered robotic printers, capable of operating in swarms, to scoop up lunar dust and form it into thousands of solid hexapods, something like the concrete barriers used to guard against coastal erosion on Earth. Also in the cargo bay would be a large lightweight balloon, packed flat, that once inflated would provide the formwork on which the robots would build a shell and ensure it took the right shape.
When the shell is complete, the airbag would be deflated, removed and stored for later use — a process that could take some months. A subsequent rocket would bring the living quarters themselves, also inflatable, that would be inserted under the shell in groups of three or four, each one equipped with a prefabricated airlock.
The first steps in this process began in 2017, when the Artemis programme, named for Apollo’s twin sister, was announced with a preliminary budget of $28bn. That money was to cover the spacecraft, the life-support system, a landing vehicle and a new generation of space suits. There have been setbacks. In January, Nasa delayed the first manned flight to the Moon from the end of this year, to September 2026. But de Kestelier has no doubt that there will be a permanent Moon settlement in the not-that-distant future.
“I am not so sure about Elon Musk shipping one million people to Mars, but I do think that a settlement on the Moon, that could include a university presence, private corporations and tourism is going to happen. How quickly it grows once the first module is in place depends on how the economy of the Moon develops.”
Is all this planning running before we can walk? de Kestelier asks himself. “No, it’s developing existing work and incorporating it in a master plan that is not science fiction.”
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