The Apollo 11 Mission, departed Earth on July 16, 1969, and touched down on the moon 4 days later. This moment marked a milestone for humanity and, to this day, makes us reflect on how technological progress is bringing us ever closer to life beyond planet Earth.
With the help of 3D printers, highly developed and fully automated constructive technology, we have compiled a selection of 15 architectural projects that demonstrate that life on the moon and beyond is closer than we've ever imagined.
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February 2021 has been a historical month for Mars exploration. While humans have been exploring the red planet for well over 50 years, first landing on its surface in 1971 and then launching the first successful rover in 1997, this year has seen several firsts, namely the first time that three countries (China, United States, and the UAE) have launched three simultaneous probes.
Clouds Architecture Office have revealed a new design for a space research lab that floats above a crater in Oita, Japan. Called AVATAR X LAB, the design was made for ANA Holdings Inc. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The lab aims to be part of ANA's AVATAR Vision, an endeavor to advance and pioneer real-world Avatar technologies, and JAXA's new research and development program J-SPARC. The lab was designed to advance understanding of space exploration and development.
There’s a decent chance that in the last few days, you’ve seen images of Analemma, the futuristic proposal from Clouds AO to hang a skyscraper (or should that be “earthscraper”?) from an asteroid in orbit of the earth. The project has been difficult to avoid, having been picked up not only by much of the architectural media but also by NBC, CNN, Forbes, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Mashable, IFLScience—the list goes on almost as long as the building itself.
Is the design realistic? Obviously not, and it’s obviously not intended to be. It’s intended as a utopian thought experiment. Clouds AO has something of a pedigree in this field, as winners of a NASA-backed competition to design a Mars base with their idea for a building made of ice. As a result, it would be facile to join the internet’s collective bottom-of-the-page comment mob to point out that it would be prohibitively expensive, or that it might be more enjoyable to live on the ground anyway.
But is the design a useful utopian thought experiment? There are some design failures that better technology, or a lot of money, or the changed mindset of a futuristic society just won’t fix. So without further ado, here are a list of the problems that this out-of-this-world design would face, in chronological order, with the issues that make it impractical in our current world marked as “minor” and the ones that would undermine the proposal in any universe marked as “major.”
NASA, who recently confirmed evidence of flowing water on Mars, has deemed SEArch (Space Exploration Architecture) and Clouds AO (Clouds Architecture Office) winners of the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge for Mars. Sponsored by NASA and America Makes, the teams were asked to use indigenous materials and 3D printing techniques to build a habitat for four astronauts on Mars. SEArch and Clouds AO's first prize proposal, ICE HOUSE was awarded $25,000, ahead of 30 other shortlisted practices.
"Recognizing that water is the building block to life, the team used a ‘follow the water’ approach to conceptualize, site and construct their design," said SEArch and Clouds AO. "[Our] proposal stood out as one of the few entries not to bury the habitat beneath regolith, instead mining the anticipated abundance of subsurface ice in the northern regions to create a thin vertical ice shell capable of protecting the interior habitat from radiation while celebrating life above ground."
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