The first house on the Moon won't be anything like NASA's geometric, 3D-printed lunar abodes or the University of Arizona's moondust-filled sandbag structures. It won't be big enough to contain a human dweller at all. At just 4 inches tall and less than 5 inches long, the house is a sculpture by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, who has dreamed of putting a miniature model house on the Moon for years.
ispace, a Japanese lunar robotics company, attached "the Moonhouse" to its RESILIENCE lander earlier this week. The Moonhouse joined five payloads totaling $16 million, including a "micro rover" expected to deploy from the lander and collect lunar regolith samples. RESILIENCE launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday alongside Blue Ghost, a lander by the Texas-based space firm Firefly Aerospace.
On a website dedicated to the Moonhouse, Genberg says the house is "an expression of humanity's ability to achieve the seemingly unattainable through boundary-crossing thoughts and collaborations" (one of which is clearly this trip). Visually ordinary with its red paneling, hand-painted windows, and tile roof, the house is meant to be a reminder that while many of us sprout from humble origins, humans are capable of exploring and expanding "beyond our known boundaries."
It's for this reason that previous versions of what is now the Moonhouse have reportedly been placed underwater, on top of Stockholm's Globe Arena, at the Great Wall of China, and aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as a companion to Sweden's first astronaut.
A technician placing the Moonhouse on RESILIENCE. Credit: Mikael Genberg
But Genberg says he's wanted to put his tiny house on the Moon for 25 years. (Sure enough, a TEDx talk from 2014 discusses the project, showing that this has been on the artist's mind for quite some time.) In a video, Genberg says it was "a crazy, maybe idiotic -- but at the same time, in my mind, really poetic -- thought to put a red house with white corners on the surface of the Moon." The idea has stuck with him ever since.
"The vision of the artwork merges with our own: to expand our planet and future, and to extend the sphere of human life into space," said ispace-Europe CEO Julien Lamamy.
If all goes well, RESILIENCE will land on the Moon in about four months. The lander will then place the house on the lunar surface, where it will sit for as long as it isn't disturbed. RESILIENCE is expected to snap some photos of the Moonhouse and send them back to Earth.
"What's the purpose?" Genberg posits in the video. "It's art."