15 hours ago
12 ARTICLE AD
“If there’s anything the world needs right now, it’s a house on the moon.” If you guessed Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos said this, you’re forgiven. But it was actually a Swedish artist, and he wasn’t talking about the kind of house you’re imagining.
On January 15, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, propelling Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s Resilience lander towards the Moon. Onboard the Resilience lander, however, is a very unusual object: a toy-sized white-trimmed red Swedish cottage called the Moonhouse, also destined—as the name suggests—for the Moon. As detailed on Mikael Genberg’s website, the artist has been dreaming of putting his Moonhouse on the lunar surface for a quarter century, and now that dream is closer than ever to becoming a reality.
“So what does it mean? What’s the meaning? What’s the purpose?” Genberg asked in a video statement. He had a very simple answer: “It’s art.” And while he says that art doesn’t carry meaning or purpose, it does carry questions.
“By placing something as simple and down-to-earth as a red house in a place as remote, inhospitable and colourless as the moon, Mikael Genberg questions our perception of what is possible and meaningful in the cosmos,” reads the project description on Moonhouse’s website. “Moreover, The Moonhouse carries a poetic undertone. It reminds us of our roots and our home on Earth while symbolizing our dreams and ambitions to explore and expand beyond our known boundaries.”
Genberg’s little red houses have previously made appearances around the world in trees, underwater, on the Great Wall of China, and even on the International Space Station. A few months from now, the Japanese-made Resilience lander is set to touch down in the northern regions of the Moon’s near side. The Moonhouse is already secured to the micro rover Tenacious, which will deploy from the lander to explore the lunar surface, according to a company statement.
© ispace Mission 2 Then, “it should release the house, take some pictures and leave it alone standing there for thousands and thousands, maybe millions of years,” Genberg explained in the video. If all goes according to plan, Moonhouse will become not just the first art project on the Moon, but also technically the first building on the moon (that we know of). Since its inception, Genberg has raised between $620,000 and $888,000 to fund the project, including the flight, as reported by the Associated Press.
For now, the Moonhouse is sharing the ride with other cargo including a food production experiment, a deep space radiation probe, water electrolyzer equipment, a commemorative alloy plate by a Japanese entertainment and engineering group, and of course, Tenacious the rover.
Ultimately, the Moon’s first building isn’t the kind of structure we all imagined—but can we really rule out the possibility of it being the perfect size for some extra terrestrial life out there? I think not.
