During the height of the pandemic, a lot of people wanted to experience a sense of escape from confinement to their homes and the stark mundaneness of life. Billionaires like Elon Musk–looked to outer space for such escape. The endless possibilities of it, the sheer unknowability of it, and humanity’s confrontation with something so utterly awe-inspiring in the grand scheme of things has always been a sort of guiding force for the species’ interest in space exploration. Space habitats were in fashion, with Musk regularly commenting on settling Mars, alongside announcements of NASA’s Artemis missions–a bid by the American space agency to establish a lunar outpost as a base for future missions–making the news.

Consequently, this interest in infinity and beyond sparked the architectural imagination with names like BIG signing on to develop 3D printed moon homes with ICON, Danish studio SOM creating models for a lunar base, to Ukraine-based practice Makhno creating a self-sustaining settlement on Mars. According to NASA’s timeline, humanity will have taken off for the stars by as close as 2040, with further Artemis research looking at the idea of 3D printing homes. In line with the idea of 3D printing as a sustainable and cost-effective option to start building a footprint on the Earth’s satellite, global design practice Hassell who have previously worked on a Mars prototype recently proposed a modular settlement near the edge of the Shackleton Crater on the Moon’s surface.

The conceptual design is a part of the European Space Agency’s Discovery Programme and was developed as a scalable system that could house up to 144 people. Science fiction has often looked to far-off planets to serve as the backdrop for encounters with aliens that often portray the innate human desire to expand our horizons, to discover worlds previously unknown. A recent book by Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility shows the inevitability of humans settling on the moon, with 1/3rd of the book having a lunar setting, and the enigma of the setting is explored by the 2009 film Moon, where the story revolves on a base which had been established to extract helium-3, explicitly showing the effects of the colonisation of the satellite.

Here, what Hassell has described as the next step in the creation of the first permanent human settlement on the moon was conceived to grow and adapt to the demands of future inhabitants. To this end, the proposal uses surrounding lunar materials such as dust and rocks, meaning that resources would not need to be transported from the Earth.

The design team identified the South Lunar Pole near the edge of the Shackleton Crater, close to where India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed as the probable site for the settlement, citing its proximity to the crater, its potential to contain frozen bodies of water and a near-constant available sunlight to its benefit. The challenge of creating habitable settlements on the hostile environment of the moon was addressed with a radically different approach to the monolithic shell structures previously proposed for lunar settlement by the design team. Hassell’s design uses 3D-printed modular components that are designed to combat lethal levels of radiation. The modular design is built to be easily assemblable, with a hexapod shape that can be interlocked to other individual units. As Xavier De Kestelier, Global Head of Design at Hassell, says: “We cannot possibly predict now how a lunar community will evolve in the next couple of decades. We therefore designed a masterplan that is adaptable to change and can accommodate various types of lunar settlements in the future.”

To create a holistic model for settlement, in an environment with a lowered gravity and atmosphere, not to mention the lethal radioactivity of outer space, the designers at Hassell worked with anthropologists, psychologists, roboticists and astronauts to create the masterplan. Advenit Makaya, Advanced Manufacturing Engineer at the European Space Agency, comments, “In a sense, [the design] is a good compromise between innovation and pragmatism, with a long-term perspective, compared to other lunar habitat studies…The multidisciplinary team also provided an insightful assessment of how that habitat design could accommodate the range of activities which would be relevant in an established sustainable human settlement.”

The plan details out not just the structure of the settlement, but also recreational and social spaces including restaurants and sports arenas, so that humans can thrive on the moon, apart from just existing. Greenhouses are also part of the plan, which means at some point humans may be able to grow food and sustain themselves fully in space. The residential units are meant to support the critical work of national agencies – including NASA, ESA and JAXA, but are also built to cater to commercial space agencies, companies and tourists.

Space tourism is a very real possibility for humanity now. There have been reports of it becoming cheaper, with commercial space agency Space Perspective having just announced the completion of the ‘world’s largest spaceflight test capsule in existence’. Further, at the same time the plan for the lunar base was unveiled, it was announced that British architect Jordan William Hughes won a prize for the design of a space elevator, to efficiently transport passengers into outer space. When space travel becomes a tangible reality, we must question the true cost of such a colonisation.

Often in fictional stories, moving outwards to space is seen as a solution to Earth becoming uninhabitable, the reasons ranging from over-population, natural resource deficit, or a natural calamity. In that vein, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles explores a colonised Mars, and how it affects the natural conditions of the alien planet, irreversibly changing the planet’s environment. Bradbury laments this transformation in a sequence of stories that go beyond human occupation sometimes. As we develop more viable ways of occupying other habitats and planetary systems, we should ask, should we? And if we do, how do we ensure we do minimal harm? With its sustainable design, Hassell’s lunar habitat presents one such possibility of occupation.