Shoot for the moon — you can land a recent home.
By 2040, Americans may very well be living on the moon, despite skeptics’ doubts, a NASA spokesperson told the Latest York Times.
“We’re at a pivotal moment, and in some ways, it appears like a dream sequence,” Niki Werkheiser, the director of technology maturation at NASA, told the outlet.
“In other ways, it appears like it was inevitable that we’d get here.”
The mission, named Artemis, will send 4 humans to orbit the moon in November 2024, followed by the first humans landing on the moon in greater than half a century a yr later.
“We’ve got all the right people together at the right time with a standard goal, which is why I feel 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 impossible.”
NASA’s futuristic lunar lodgings are being designed by cutting-edge architecture firms Bjarke Ingels Group and SEArch+ (Space Exploration Architecture), who’ve 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 even be 3-D printed partially with the help of Icon, a Texas company that has begun printing homes and received greater than $57 million in funding, CBS News reports. Eventually, they hope to bring or construct 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 construct the lunar shelter.
“So that you either have to understand how to use what’s up there or send all the pieces you would like,” Suermann said.
NASA’s out-of-this-world news comes amid an area race for interstellar tourism from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.