Explore Moon Architecture
Workshop @Digital FUTURES

NASA’s Artemis Program is envisioning a plan to drive humanity to live on our closest celestial body: the Moon. The dream of designing and building a permanent outpost on the lunar surface to allow human explorers to live at 250,000 miles from Earth is becoming reality.  Indeed, designing a resilient and sustainable infrastructure for manned missions on the Moon is a new design challenge that requires a new design holistic approach. Space Architecture relies on some fundamental pillars that are intrinsically interconnected: space sciences, engineering, industrial design, ergonomics, medicine, psychology, and art.   

The Workshop Explore Moon Architecture (E.M.A.) allowed students to build on the knowledge and technologies developed for space applications and explore innovative architectural design solutions of an integrated habitat on the Moon. The projects are based on the conditions unique to the lunar environment, such as reduced gravity, extreme thermal differentials, high-energy solar exposure, cosmic radiation, high velocity micrometeorite impact, abrasive-electrostatic regolith, zero atmosphere and constrained human living space and human factor design principles. A computational design approach has been applied in order to perform multi-objective optimization form-finding analysis to take into account human and environmental requirements for a lunar habitat.

Instructor: Valentina Sumini, MIT Media Lab  and Politecnico di Milano

Participants: Praneeth Aashwinay, Evgenia Angelaki, Silvio De Mio, Simina Ioana Dimcea, Shrey Gupta, Hanieh Kouchaki, Joaquín Rodríguez P., Debashish Roy, Mohammed Saifiz, Misbah Shehreen Baig, Luciana Tenorio, Yanchen Wang