Two Danish designers have developed an origami-inspired foldable house that could be useful for offworld explorers from NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon.
The project, called ‘Lunark Habitat’, is a compact portable structure that can be expanded and folded to allow easy transport.
The idea for the lunar shelter comes from ‘space architects’ Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sorensen, from design company SAGA Space Architects.
The exterior of the habitat consists of a strong aluminum frame covered with solar cells, while the interior contains a toilet and living quarters with desks and shelves. It is designed for two persons.
“By combining the ancient Japanese art of paper folding with the method of biomimicry we have come to a lightweight and strong foldable,” the designers write on their website. “The final hinge design is a compliant mechanism, it’s lightweight, strong, airtight, simple to manufacture and to maintain”.
The habitat weights about 1,700kg and can expand from an easily stowable 2.8 cubic metres to an impressive 17 cubic metres.
Aristotelis and Sorensen will test the efficiency of the Lunark Habitat this fall, living inside it for three months in Arctic regions of Greenland, where -30-degree Celsius temperatures are said to replicate the freezing conditions on the moon.
“We will live in complete solitude, cut off from the rest of the world, to test the architecture, ourselves, and technologies for future Moon missions,” the two designers note. “Arctic Greenland is one of the most Moon-like places on Earth – a strange desolate white planet. By going there, we don’t have to pretend. It will feel real”.