Space is back in the news. Whether it\u2019s Donald Trump unveiling Space Force uniforms inspired by Starship Troopers, the SpaceX flotation that made Elon Musk the world\u2019s first trillionaire (for a whole 12 days), or NASA\u2019s Artemis II, which carried four astronauts around the Moon in April \u2013 the final frontier suddenly feels fashionable once more. Not that jackboots ever really went out of fashion.<\/p>\n
The next few years will see even bigger milestones in mankind\u2019s journey towards the stars: Artemis IV will land astronauts at the Moon\u2019s south pole in 2028, for the first time since 1972; China plans to follow suit before 2030; new privately owned space stations such as Vast\u2019s Haven-2 and Axiom are due to start replacing the ageing International Space Station at about the same time. Both the Chinese and the Americans plan to start tentatively building semi-permanent bases on our nearest celestial neighbour in the next few years.<\/p>\n
But the grandest ambition belongs to Musk. In February 2026 he said SpaceX could create a \u2018self-growing city\u2019 on the Moon in less than ten years. Mars has not disappeared from his plan either. Musk has repeatedly suggested that a self-sustaining settlement of a million people could be established there within 30 years and his preferred ending is already scripted: \u2018I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.\u2019<\/p>\n
How do you build a home on a world where there is no breathable air?<\/p>\n
All this means the story is not just about rockets. It\u2019s about architecture and addressing what happens after touchdown. How do you build a home on a world where there is no breathable air, let alone Monday morning site deliveries? How do you stop its occupants being irradiated, frozen or slowly driven insane by one another? And how do you construct an entire city when every conventional beam, window and toilet would first have to be blasted out of Earth\u2019s gravity at eye-watering expense?<\/p>\n
The answer to the last question is surprisingly simple: you don\u2019t. Instead, almost every serious proposal for extraterrestrial building relies on \u2018in-situ resource utilisation\u2019 \u2013 which is space-speak for using whatever happens to be lying around.<\/p>\n
On the Moon and Mars that means regolith: the layer of dust and broken rock covering the surface. And one of the architecture firms furthest ahead in working out what to do with it is, unexpectedly, Britain\u2019s Foster + Partners, better known for London\u2019s Gherkin skyscraper and Apple\u2019s doughnut-shaped headquarters. Fosters has been designing buildings for other planets for more than a decade.<\/p>\n
Its Mars habitat concept, a finalist in a NASA competition, imagines sending an army of semi-autonomous robots ahead of the astronauts. Large \u2018Diggers\u2019 excavate a crater; \u2018Transporters\u2019 pile Martian soil around inflatable habitation pods; then smaller \u2018Melters\u2019 use microwaves to fuse the regolith into a solid protective shell. The astronauts therefore arrive to find, if not quite the Ritz, at least a finished home.<\/p>\n
Fosters lunar work is stranger still. Thanks to a NASA research grant, it has designed a 50-metre tower intended to support solar-power generation at the lunar south pole by lofting arrays into perpetual sunlight. A spiral track is incorporated into its helical structure so robots can move up and down it during construction. As Fosters puts it rather wonderfully, this means \u2018the tower can build itself\u2019. That\u2019s right: they\u2019re already designing self-building skyscrapers for the Moon.<\/p>\n
Other designers have decided that Martian dirt is altogether too dreary and propose building with water instead. Mars Ice House, which won another NASA competition, would harvest subterranean ice to print a huge translucent shell around the living quarters; the ice would block dangerous radiation while allowing visible light through. Instead of colonists skulking in underground bunkers like survivors of a nuclear war, they might live in something akin to a glowing palace.<\/p>\n
Masa Sono, one of the architects involved, envisages spending perhaps two years harvesting water, but its beauty, he argues, would ensure \u2018the mental well-being of the astronauts\u2019.<\/p>\n
Keeping humans physically alive turns out to only be part of the problem<\/p>\n
That may sound like justifying the interplanetary equivalent of a picture window, but psychology is becoming one of space architecture\u2019s central concerns. Keeping humans physically alive turns out to only be part of the problem. Keeping them borderline happy is another.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve tried to live in space before, of course, not least on the International Space Station, which is essentially a machine that happens to contain people. Its interiors are an extraordinary tangle of wires, storage bags and equipment, with almost every surface in service. In future, we\u2019ll have to do better, not least if we want space tourism to truly take off.<\/p>\n
So the next generation of space habitats is beginning to look rather less like the inside of a boiler and rather more like somewhere you might willingly spend an evening on a date. And that includes the commercial space stations that are lining up to replace the ISS when it is deorbited later this decade.<\/p>\n
For example, Axiom Space have commissioned the famous French designer Philippe Starck to work on their station. He envisages the astronaut\u2019s bedroom as a \u2018comfortable and friendly egg\u2019, with soft surfaces and hundreds of tiny LEDs whose colours would alter according to the inhabitant\u2019s mood. It sounds like a cross between a womb and a branch of Soho House, but the idea behind it is serious. In an environment without normal days, seasons, weather or even an obvious up and down, architecture has to compensate for sensory experiences we barely notice on Earth. Privacy matters, as do communal spaces, indoor plants, windows and having somewhere to retreat when the person you have been eating breakfast with for the past few months starts chewing with their mouth open.<\/p>\n
But the strangest requirement of extraterrestrial architecture may actually be beauty.<\/p>\n
A successful lunar or Martian building obviously needs to be safe. But it must also remind its occupants why they travelled all that way in the first place.<\/p>\n
Mars Ice House, for instance, includes a protected \u2018front yard\u2019 between its inner rooms and outer shell from which inhabitants could experience the Martian landscape and its daylight cycle without putting on a full spacesuit. Bjarke Ingels\u2019 plan for a monumental 3D-printed lunar base \u2013 Project Olympus \u2013 likewise incorporates an \u2018Earth lounge\u2019 with a window permanently framing our blue home for a sense of connection.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which brings us back to Musk\u2019s million-person city. The greatest difficulty may not be getting people there at all. The Starship reusable rocket, or something like it, can eventually solve that problem. The harder challenge is creating a settlement with its own power, farms, factories, hospitals, streets, homes, social life and even culture. We\u2019ve got to the stage where we can just about build habitats on other planets from dust and ice, but creating a whole civilisation remains a stretch.<\/p>\n
Still, if we\u2019re going to create a new civilisation from scratch, we might as well try to improve on the old one \u2013 and that means no space Nazis, no Star Wars Imperial Navy peaked caps, and you have to leave the jackboots at the airlock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Space is back in the news. Whether it\u2019s Donald Trump unveiling Space Force uniforms inspired by Starship Troopers,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[192304,61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-623621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-coffee-house","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}