Designing the future of extraterrestrial human habitats

A new MIT course this spring invited students to conceptualise the essentials for human comfort and productivity in space. The necessity for such innovations is immediate - unlike the NASA Apollo missions, which involved brief moon landings, sample collections, and returns to Earth, the Artemis programme aims to establish enduring bases both in lunar orbit and on the moon's surface.

The cross-disciplinary design course MAS.S66/4.154/16.89 (Space Architectures) was offered collaboratively by the departments of Architecture, Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), and the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiatives group. Thirty-five students from various disciplines across the Institute enrolled to envision, design, prototype, and test solutions for sustaining human life and activities on the moon.

The course’s popularity did not surprise the instructors, coming at an exciting time for the future of space exploration with many projects in the works, such as Artemis which aims to put a human settlement on the moon. It was only earlier this year that a lunar lander, Odysseus, saw success.

“A lot of students at MIT are excited about space,” says Jeffrey Hoffman, one of the Course Instructors and Professor of the practice in AeroAstro. “Certainly in AeroAstro, half the students want to be astronauts eventually, so it’s not like they hadn’t thought about living in space before. This was an opportunity to use that inspiration and work on a project that might become an actual design for real lunar habitats.”

The designing of lunar habitats

Hoffman was brutally honest about the realities of space: “Space is one of the most hostile environments you can imagine,” he says. “You're sitting inside a spacecraft looking out the window, realizing that on the other side of that window, I'd be dead in a few seconds.”

To tackle such a tricky environment, the students were organised into seven teams, and the importance of teamwork soon became clear. During the initial concept phase, architects and engineers often clashed—the architects aimed to create comfortable, liveable spaces, while the engineers focused on the practical challenges posed by the moon's harsh environment.

Several innovative inflatable designs emerged: a modular inflatable mobile science library that could accommodate up to four people; a rapidly deployable inflatable habitat providing short-term shelter and protection for lunar crews; and a semi-permanent in situ habitat intended for use before a permanent lunar base is established.

Working across disciplines

With students coming from many different academic backgrounds, the unique challenge of working across disciplines emerges.

“Architects and engineers tend to approach the design process differently,” says Annika Thomas, a mechanical engineering doctoral student and member of the MoonBRICCS team. “While it was a challenge to integrate these ideas early on, we found ways over time to communicate and coordinate our ideas, brought together by a common vision for the end of the project.”

For example, Thomas's teammates, architecture students Juan Daniel Hurtado Salazar and Mikita Klimenka, noted that technical considerations in architecture are typically addressed during the middle and latter stages of a project.

“This gives us too much space to put off the implications of our design decisions while leaving little time to resolve them,” says Salazar. “The insight of our engineers challenged every design decision from the onset with mechanical, economic, and technological implications of current space technology and material regimes. It also provided a fruitful arena to cooperatively discuss the concern that the most materially and economically optimal solutions are not always the most culturally or morally justified, as the emergence of long-term habitats brings the full gamut of an astronaut’s functional, social, and emotional needs to the forefront.”

“The wealth of knowledge and experience present within the team allowed us to meaningfully consider possible responses to producing a viable long-term habitat. While navigating both engineering and design constraints certainly required additional effort, the thinking process overall was extremely refreshing as we exposed ourselves to totally different sets of challenges that we do not typically deal with in our domains,” added Klimenka.

Molly Johnson, an AeroAstro graduate student and team member on the lunarNOMAD project, also shares these views on the challenges of interdisciplinary work. “Traditionally, for a systems engineer such as myself, it is easy to wave away the small design details and say they'll be addressed without going into detail about how they'll be addressed. The architects brought in a new level of detail that helped clarify our intentions.”

You can find a full list of the teams’ approaches, and more information about the course, on the MIT website, here.