Mission to moon carries tiny, red Swedish home to space

A Swedish artist is about to have the dream of a lifetime fulfilled: A little red model house he created will be launched into space this week and, if all goes according to plan, put on the surface of the moon.

The Moonhouse, the size of a big hand, will hitch a ride to the moon on a lunar lander operated by the Japanese company ispace. It’s set for takeoff on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral at 1:11 a.m. Wednesday.

Artist Mikael Genberg says he has been wanting to put his typically Swedish-looking miniature house on the moon for 25 years.

It was “a crazy, maybe idiotic, but at the same time, in my mind, really poetic thought to put a red house with white corners on the surface of the moon,” Genberg said in a video posted on Facebook. “And now it’s going to happen.”

“What’s the purpose? It’s art,” he added.

Genberg, who is currently in Florida to watch Wednesday’s launch in person, said he was very excited to finally see his house get shot into space.

“It’s small on this planet, but it will be big on the moon — there’s nothing like that in space,” he told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

The house is made out of aluminum and daubed with a special, space-certified paint. It’s 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) long, 8 cms (3.1 inches) wide and 10 cms (3.9 inches) tall.

Genberg’s signature art project has already traveled the world in recent years. The Moonhouse has been installed up in trees, underwater, was taken to the Great Wall of China, and even to the International Space Station 400 kilometers (248 miles) above Earth as a companion to Sweden’s first astronaut, Christer Fuglesang, according to the project’s website.

While it was Genberg’s idea to put the house on the moon with the help of lunar rover Tenacious, about 70 people donated some 7 million – 10 million Swedish kronor ($620,000 – $888,000) for the project, which also includes the flight, he said.

“The vision of the artwork merges with our own; to expand our planet and future, and to extend the sphere of human life into space,” Julien-Alexandre Lamamy, the CEO of ispace Europe, said in a statement.

If the launch is successful, Genberg says that once the rover lands on the moon in about four months, “it should release the house, take some pictures and leave it alone standing there for thousands and thousands and maybe millions of years.”