It has been 50 years since humanity walked on the Moon, but we're going back. NASA's Artemis Program is underway, aiming to land the first crewed mission on the lunar surface around 2025. And unlike last time, NASA plans to stay for the long term, with plans for a space station and surface operations. The agency has also revealed plans for lunar homes, and it's partnered with a company called Icon to make it happen. If all goes as planned, people could be living in lunar homesteads within our lifetimes.
The plan is called Project Olympus, and it could bear fruit as soon as 2040. Icon is already working on the technology that could eventually lead to lunar homes (that may or may not look like the above concept). It uses 3D printers to construct houses on Earth faster and more sustainably than with traditional methods. As NASA has suggested in the past, this building technique could be an ideal application of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). That means using materials at your destination rather than bringing everything with you.
The first step would be for NASA to fly a massive 3D printer to the Moon. Icon's printers have proven themselves on Earth, but in space? Most spaceflight hardware is designed from the ground up to be resistant to radiation and extreme temperatures. Early next year, NASA will drop the Icon printer into a special test chamber at Marshall Space Flight Center, reports The New York Times. There, the printer will be subjected to the intense radiation and vacuum it would experience on the Moon.
NASA first partnered with Icon in 2020, funding research on printing structures beyond low-Earth orbit. In 2022, NASA announced a $60 million contract for a space construction system that could build habitats and rocket landing pads. The inclusion of civilian housing in Project Olympus is a new wrinkle in NASA's ever-expanding lunar plans.
Icon hopes to use lunar soil as the base for its 3D printing, but it's unclear how durable such a material would be long-term. Dust on the Moon is extremely abrasive, and there is concern that the construction materials could end up damaging the 3D printer and other hardware. That's why NASA has started funding research so early. With almost two decades of lead time, NASA believes it will be possible to get the kinks worked out by 2040 or so.
There will be a series of lunar tests before NASA starts building the Moon's first starter home, but that will come after the Artemis Program ramps up. So far, NASA has launched Artemis I, an uncrewed lunar flyby and the first test of the Space Launch System. Artemis II will feature a crewed flyby as soon as next year, and that will be followed by the first crewed landing with Artemis III. Sometime after that, the agency will have to build landing pads on the surface where equipment like the 3D printers can land. It's possible the SpaceX Starship, which is still in development, could haul the necessary equipment to the Moon. We're looking at years before there are any in-situ tests, so don't put your terrestrial house on the market just yet.
