Shoot for the moon — you could land a new home.
By 2040, Americans could be living on the moon, despite skeptics’ doubt, a NASA spokesperson told The New York Times.
“We’re at a pivotal moment, and in some ways, it feels like a dream sequence,” Niki Werkheiser, the director of technology maturation at NASA, told the outlet.
“In other ways, it feels like it was inevitable that we would get here.”
The mission, named Artemis, will send four humans to orbit the moon in November 2024, followed by the first humans landing on the moon in more than half a century — and the second time in history — a year later.
“We’ve got all the right people together at the right time with a common goal, which is why I think we’ll get there,” added Werkheiser.
“Everybody is so ready to take this step together, so if we get our capabilities developed, there’s no reason it’s not possible.”
NASA’s futuristic lunar lodgings are being designed by cutting-edge architecture firms Bjarke Ingels Group and SEArch+ (Space Exploration Architecture), who have been charged with creating structures out of a never-before-forged material: moon matter — fragments of dust, rocks and other minerals found on the crater-ridden surface. In theory, homes built from lunar resources will allow the buildings to brave the hazardous conditions on Earth’s satellite.
The buildings will also be 3-D printed in part with the help of Icon, a Texas company that has already begun printing homes on Earth and received more than $57 million in funding, CBS News reports. Eventually, they hope to bring or build a printer to operate on the moon and further human colonization.
“There’s no Home Depot up there,” Patrick Suermann, interim dean of Texas A&M’s School of Architecture, told the Times. His team of university researchers have partnered with NASA to create robots to help build the lunar shelter.
“So you either have to know how to use what’s up there or send everything you need,” Suermann said.
NASA’s out-of-this-world news comes amid a space race for interstellar tourism from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
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