The Moon will soon get its first little home.
And it’s not just a small house, it’s a symbolic house. Swedish red house with white corners.
Launched from a Japanese lunar module and mounted on the mission rover’s front bumper is “Moonhouse,” a project that Mikael Genberg has been working on for 25 years.
“I have been working with symbols as an artist for many years,” Genberg said in the video release. “I’ve been trying to find strange places, like tree houses, or underwater, on water, or the largest spherical building in the world. A house on the moon.”
To be clear, this is not a house you can live in. Genberg once envisioned a self-deploying installation measuring 8 feet (2.5 meters) tall, but the realized Moonhouse measures 3 inches high, 4 inches wide, and 2.5 inches deep (8.6 x 11 x 6.4 cm).
“Experienced engineers have been involved in Moonhouse’s technical design for the past two years. The house’s structure underwent extensive shock and vibration testing to ensure it could withstand and survive intact all the stresses and challenges it would face during a trip to the moon. Emil Vinterhav, Head of Technology at Moonhouse, said in a recent statement:
relevant: SpaceX is set to launch two private lunar landers this week, kicking off a busy year of lunar missions.
Moonhouse’s exploration of the lunar surface is handled by ispace, a company focused on designing and building lunar landers and rovers that operates in Japan, Luxembourg and the United States. In April 2023, ispace attempted to land the first Hakuto-R lander on the moon, but it failed and failed to achieve a soft touchdown due to software issues.
Genberg’s Moonhouse will be aboard ispace’s second attempt to reach the lunar surface. The company used the lunar lander ‘Resilience’ and the rover ‘Tenacious’ to land on Mare Frigoris (‘Sea of Cold’) on the closest side of the moon, or in the far north of the Earth-facing side, after a four-month space journey. We aim to do so. .
ispace’s Mission 2 is scheduled to launch as early as Wednesday (January 15) morning from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, along with another company’s lunar lander, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost.
Moonhouse is one of six payloads flying on the ispace mission. It also includes a food production experiment, a deep space radiation probe and a commemorative metal plaque from toy company Bandai Namco modeled after the “Space Century Charter.” Animation series ‘Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn’.
Julien-Alexandre Lamamy, CEO of ispace Europe, said: “The Moonhouse is an epic story that Mikael Genberg has been trying to bring to life for 25 years. We are delighted to have helped bring to fruition an iconic work of art full of new possibilities and ideas. “He said. .
Genberg came up with the idea for Moonhouse in 1999. Europe’s first lunar missionSMART-1 was built by the Swedish Space Agency. Using symbols already associated with his homeland (the red color of the house dates back to 16th-century paint extracted from Sweden’s Falun copper mine), he began creating works of art that were “determined by the individual’s imagination.” Their own home.”
Prior to this mission, Genberg sent a version of the Moonhouse to the International Space Station in addition to numerous Earth-based locations. Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglsang. For launch, the model was made from cardstock that was folded flat and then popped out to form a 3D building. Fuglesang placed the house and captured video of it floating freely in microgravity. STS-128 mission He boarded NASA’s space shuttle Discovery in 2009.
now moon house Heading to its ultimate destination, Genberg hopes it will become “a symbol of humanity’s eternal search for the unknown and the unexplored.”
“Perhaps this house on the Moon could symbolize life’s eternal quest to evolve, expand consciousness and see Earth from a new perspective,” he said. “Isn’t a house on the moon exactly what the world needs right now?”
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