Futures Moon Cities could Look Like Bouncy Houses

Brief

FUTURE MOON DWELLINGS could end up looking a bit like our terrestrial camping sites: Lunar residents may carry an inflatable structure with them and blow it up when they get there. These have a major advantage as you can fit a massive living structure inside a much smaller rocket.

Insight

Humans could live in inflatable houses buried under the lunar soil and supported by food from inflatable greenhouses, according to a recent concept study funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) and drawn up by Pneumocell, an Austria-based company specializing in inflatable architecture.

It isn’t Pneumocell’s first blow-up space idea. The company has previously designed an inflatable Mars habitat and a partially inflatable spacecraft. But they were just that — concepts. “It’s very difficult in a small country like Austria to get funding for such an idea,” says Thomas Herzig, an architect at Pneumocell.

Rather than halt their out-of-this-world idea, Herzig and his colleagues acquired an ESA grant last year. Even so, ambitious off-Earth habitat designs like theirs have a long way to go before they can see the light of the (lunar) day.Any off-Earth habitat has one key goal: to keep its crew alive outside of the atmosphere we evolved to survive in.

There are many formidable dangers that await us on the Moon. California’s earthquakes and wildfires have nothing on the micrometeoroids, constant radiation, and apocalyptic temperature swings (from 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the two-week-long day to 200 degrees below 0 in the two-week-long night) that plague the lunar surface.

But as they say in real estate, it’s all about location. The specific areas that people settle in could minimize some of these threats.For example, humans could live underground, where the lunar regolith would protect them from the worst of the elements. Moon migrants could also land in polar regions, where we could tap water from the ground.