Little house on the (moon) prairie: Artist’s ‘Moonhouse’ set to lift off on lunar lander

The moon is about to gain its first tiny house.

And not just any small house, but an iconic Swedish red house with white corners.

Launching on a Japanese moon lander and mounted to the front bumper of the mission’s rover is the “Moonhouse,” a project by Mikael Genberg that has been 25 years in the making.

“I’ve been working with the symbol as an artist for years and years,” said Genberg in a video release. “I’ve been trying to find weird spots like tree houses or under the water or on the water or on the biggest spherical building in the world … but it was all about narrowing in towards this really ultimate piece of art, putting a house on the moon.”

To be clear, this is not a house you could live inside. Although Genberg once envisioned it as a self-unfolding installation that would stand 8 feet (2.5 meters) tall, the Moonhouse as realized is 3 inches high, 4 inches wide and 2.5 inches deep (8.6 by 11 by 6.4 centimeters).

“Experienced engineers have worked on the Moonhouse’s technical design over the past two years. The house structure has undergone extensive shock and vibration tests to ensure it can withstand all the stresses and challenges it will face during the journey to the moon and survive intact in its new climate,” said Emil Vinterhav, head of the Moonhouse technical team, in a recent statement.

Related: SpaceX will launch 2 private lunar landers this week, kicking off busy year for moon missions

The Moonhouse’s ride to the lunar surface is by ispace, a company focused on designing and building lunar landers and rovers with operations in Japan, Luxembourg and the United States. In April 2023, ispace attempted to land its first Hakuto-R lander on the moon but suffered a failure and did not achieve a soft touchdown due a software issue.

Genberg’s Moonhouse will be aboard ispace’s second attempt at reaching the lunar surface. Using its moon lander “Resilience” and rover “Tenacious,” the company is targeting a landing at Mare Frigoris (“Sea of Cold”) in the far north of the moon’s near or Earth-facing side after a four-month journey through space.

ispace’s Mission 2 is set to launch with another company’s moon lander, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as Wednesday morning (Jan. 15).

The Moonhouse is one of six payloads flying on the ispace mission, which also includes a food production experiment, a deep space radiation probe and a commemorative metal plate from the toy company Bandai Namco that is styled after the “Charter of the Universal Century” from the anime series “Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn.”

“The Moonhouse is an epic story that Mikael Genberg has strived to realize for a quarter of a century. We are excited to be part of completing an iconic artwork filled with new possibilities and ideas,” said Julien-Alexandre Lamamy, CEO of ispace Europe.

Genberg came up with the idea for the Moonhouse in 1999 after learning that Europe’s first probe to the moon, SMART-1, was built by the Swedish Space Corporation. Using a symbol already associated with his home country — the red color of the houses dates back to a 16th-century paint derived from the Falun copper mine in Sweden — he set about to create an artwork that was “governed by individual imagination — everyone has their own moonhouse.”

Prior to this mission, in addition to numerous Earth-based locales, Genberg sent a version of the Moonhouse to the International Space Station with Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang. That model was made of cardstock that folded flat for its launch and then popped open to form a 3D building. Fuglesang filmed video of himself deploying the house and letting it float free in microgravity during his STS-128 mission aboard NASA’s space shuttle Discovery in 2009.

Now that the Moonhouse is bound for its ultimate destination, Genberg hopes it can be a “symbol of humanity’s eternal pursuit of the unknown and unexplored.”

“Perhaps this house on the moon can symbolize life’s eternal quest to evolve, to extend our consciousness and to view our planet from a new perspective,” he said. “Isn’t a house on the moon exactly what the world needs right now?”

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