Semi-Inflatable Moon Village Concept Offers Glimpse at Life Beyond Earth

These days Venice, Italy, is hosting a show called the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. It is there that the European Space Agency (ESA) and architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) are showing together the concept of a lunar settlement, something called the Moon Village.

The design is a semi-inflatable one, inspired by the International Space Station’s (ISS) Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). It comes as a shell structure that can be transported to the Moon, deposited there and inflated either by astronauts on site or by rovers operated remotely from the upcoming lunar space station, the Gateway.

According to SOM, the design was chosen because it offers “the highest possible volume to mass ratio,” doubling its original internal volume once inflated. When fully deployed, it would be capable of housing four people for periods as long as 300 days, and more of these units could be deployed to form a small city.

Each reconfigurable construction would have four floors and would be located on the rim of Shackleton crater, near the lunar South Pole. That place was chosen because the Sun shines almost uninterrupted here, the view is incredible, with the Earth always in the sky, and of course, lunar ice water is very close by.

For now, the Moon Village is just a concept, one that took SOM three years to design. Such ideas will probably be needed by space exploration industry sooner rather than later, so we expect this project not to be the only one to come to light trying to imagine human life beyond Earth.