This spring, a novel MIT course challenged students to design what humans might need to work and live comfortably in space. The time for these works is now. While NASA’s Apollo missions landed astronauts on the Moon, collected samples, and returned home, missions planned for Artemis, NASA’s current lunar exploration program, include establishing long-term bases in orbit and on the lunar surface.
The interdisciplinary design course MAS.S66/4.154/16.89 (Space Architectures) was taught concurrently with the Architecture, Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) departments and the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiatives group. Thirty-five students from across the Institute registered to imagine, design, prototype, and test what might be needed for human habitation and activity on the Moon.
The course’s popularity was no surprise to instructors.
“Many MIT students are excited about space,” says Jeffrey Hoffman, one of the course instructors and a professor of practice at AeroAstro. Before teaching at MIT, Hoffman was a NASA astronaut who flew five missions aboard the Space Shuttle. “Certainly at AeroAstro half of the students want to become astronauts eventually, so it’s not like they haven’t thought about life in space before. This was an opportunity to take that inspiration and work on a project that could become an actual design for real lunar habitats.”
MIT’s history with NASA, and the Apollo missions in particular, is well documented. NASA’s first major Apollo contract was awarded to MIT in 1961. Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and former deputy administrator of NASA, also served as the course instructor.
The aim of the classes was to prepare students for the next stage of work and life in space. In addition to the Artemis mission, the enhance in the number of commercial spaceflights heralds the need to explore these projects.
“MIT Architecture has always been most successful at the intersection of research and practice,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, course instructor and chair of the architecture department. “As more and more designers are called upon to design for extreme environments and conditions – including space – we see an important opportunity for research, collaboration and new forms of practice, including ongoing collaborations with Media Lab and AeroAstro on design for extreme environments.”
Designing lunar habitats
A characteristic aspect of the classes is the combination of architecture and engineering students. Every group they brought different ways of thinking and approaches to the questions and challenges presented to them. Joint activities, guest lectures and a week-long tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas; SpaceX launch facility in Brownsville, Texas; and ICON’s 3D printing facilities for construction in Austin, Texas, exposed students to teams already working in the field. The most significant of their lessons: understanding the challenging environments for which they will be designing.
Hoffman doesn’t beat around the bush about what life in space is like.
“Space is one of the most hostile environments imaginable,” he says. “You sit in a spaceship and look out the window and realize that on the other side of the window I would be dead in a matter of seconds.”
The students were divided into seven teams to develop their projects, and the value of collaboration quickly became obvious. The teams began with a conceptual phase in which the visions of the architects – whose impulse was to create a comfortable and livable habitat – sometimes clashed with the visions of the engineers, who were more focused on the realities of the extreme environment.
Inflatable designs have featured in several designs: a modular inflatable mobile science library that can accommodate up to four people; an inflatable habitat that can be deployed in minutes to provide short-term shelter and protection for crew on the Moon; and a semi-permanent in situ habitat for space exploration in front of an established lunar base.
Finding a common language
“Architects and engineers tend to approach the design process differently,” says Annika Thomas, a mechanical engineering PhD student and member MoonBRICCS Team. “While integrating these ideas early on was challenging, over time we found ways to communicate and coordinate our ideas, united by a shared vision for completing the project.”
Thomas’s teammates, architecture students Juan Daniel Hurtado Salazar and Mikita Klimenka, say that technical issues in architecture are often resolved midway through and at the end of a project.
“This gives us too much room to delay the consequences of our design decisions while leaving little time to resolve them,” Salazar says. “The insight of our engineers questioned every design decision from the very beginning, keeping in mind the mechanical, economic and technological implications of current space technology and materials regimes. It also provided a fruitful arena for collective discussion of concerns that the most materially and economically optimal solutions are not always the most culturally or morally sound, as the advent of long-term habitats brings the full range of functional, social and emotional needs to the forefront for astronauts.”
Says Klimenka: “The team’s wealth of knowledge and experience allowed us to meaningfully consider possible responses to creating a viable, long-term habitat. While navigating the engineering and design constraints certainly required additional effort, the overall thought process was extremely refreshing as we exposed ourselves to a completely different set of challenges that we don’t typically encounter in our domains.
Architecture graduate Kaicheng Zhuang, who collaborated with engineers on The Moon Sandbags Projectsays communication skills were “crucial” to the team’s successful collaboration.
“For engineers, the most important thing is to focus on technical feasibility and practical implementation, making sure that each element of the design can be realistically implemented,” Zhuang says. “They needed clear, precise information on structural integrity, material properties and functionality. On the other hand, in our architecture team, discussions often focus on conceptual and aesthetic aspects such as visual effect, spatial dynamics and user experience.
Molly Johnson, AeroAstro graduate and team member lunar projectNOMAD, That’s right. “Traditionally, it’s easy for a systems engineer like me to skip over the minor design details and say they’ll be addressed without going into detail about how they’ll be addressed. The architects introduced a new level of detail that helped clarify our intentions.
Team at the back Momo: a self-organizing lunar habitat created a mission profile for their project. The semi-permanent in situ habitat was designed for space exploration prior to establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The module is so flexible that it can be folded almost flat, which makes it easier to transport. Their project was recently profiled IN .
Beyond Earth
The final designs showed huge differences between the teams, even though there are “a limited number of ways to keep humans alive on the lunar surface,” says Cody Paige, director of Space Exploration Initiatives and course instructor. Students had to consider what type of materials would be needed; how they will be transported and assembled; how long their structures will remain functional; and, among other things, what social or human experiences will be supported.
The hands-on experience creating life-size models was especially important for this course, given that Paige says artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly important part of so many tasks and decision-making areas.
“Computers don’t always translate accurately to the real world, so having students create prototypes shows them that there are many benefits to understanding the materials they’re working with, how they function in real life, and how they feel when tactile. skills you can gain from working with these materials,” says Paige.
While some projects seemed fantastic – thanks to the combination of architecture, engineering and design – they may soon become feasible, especially as more architects are hired to design space spaces and students understand the landscape and the needs of demanding environments.
“We need to educate our students to be pioneers in this field,” says Skylar Tibbits, a professor in the school of architecture and one of the course instructors. “The longer astronauts are in space or on the moon, we need to design habitats that people will want to live in for the long term.”
There is a growing demand for architects and engineers qualified in this particular field. Thomas – an engineering student on the MoonBRICCS team – is currently working on robotics for space applications. Her teammate Palak Patel is an engineering PhD student working on extreme environment materials for space applications. Given the enthusiasm of the students, as well as the significant real professional needs, the three academic units plan to continue offering this course in the future.
“We see this expanding into a multi-year design program for extreme environments – in space and on Earth – and we are actively discussing sponsorships and partnerships,” says de Monchaux.