Human homes on the moon, Mars, space and underwater
The most common drug taken on the International Space Station is sleeping pills because astronauts enter orbit they live in a light cycle that doesn’t match their biology. Their bodies don’t know when to sleep or when to wake up, and the disorder lasts for weeks or months, affecting their performance, mood and physical health.
For SAGA Space Architectsthe Copenhagen-based architecture and space studio founded by Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sørensen, this is no spaceship problem. The design of the house is also to blame for those who want to go to the Moon, Marsand the ocean floor and live there, the structure must first be adapted to their needs.
all images courtesy of SAGA Space Architects
Saga space architects focuses on designs for wellness
The Moon is the next closest surface to Earth, and NASA’s Artemis program is building toward a permanent human presence there within this decade. Mars represents the longest horizon, a planet with a 24.6-hour day, evidence of past water, and enough distance from Earth that any mission there would require a home capable of sustaining life for years without resupply. The ocean floor is closer and already accessible, but less than 0.01 percent of it has been directly explored. Each of these three environments contains resources, research potential and, in the case of Mars, the question of whether human civilization can exist beyond a single planet. For SAGA, all three also have the same design problem: a person has to live there, and nothing in any of them was built for that purpose.
As a means of solving the problem of rising voltage, the studio it has built a lunar habitat tested in the Arctic, a shelter on Mars that runs in dust storms, an underwater structure at the bottom of Copenhagen harbor and a training facility for the European Space Agency. When they started designing them, they started with the human body. SAGA Space Architects designs for human needs when their location and environment changes, in the sense that a person who spends months in a confined habitat still needs surfaces that feel something. They need to know what time of day it is or have a place that is quiet when they sleep and properly lit when they work. These, among others, are some basic conditions under which they continue to live at all.
view inside FLEXHab
Natural materials and technologies give life
That’s why natural materials feature in structures designed by SAGA Space Architects for the Moon, Mars, space and the ocean floor: cork on floors and storage surfaces, natural wool felt on walls, recycled textile panels hand-dyed in the studio, polyline fabrics lining sleeping pods and Alcantara on vegan surfaces. These are household materials, the kind found in well-designed apartments rather than labs, added to future homes that must also withstand pressure, hurricane-scale winds and -30°C temperatures.
In each project, they occupy the same room. The circadian lighting system, for example, that runs through LUNARK, the Rosenberg habitat, and FLEXHab is a clear expression of this: a technology that can give the astronaut living inside a sunrise, noon, and night, regardless of what’s happening outside. Here, constraint and form in terms of design and environment confront each other, allowing the team to treat each as a design element.
multipurpose room inside FLEXHab
Take the Dandelion shelter on Mars that collects static electricity from dust particles with acrylic-coated carbon fiber spikes on its exterior. The dust storm becomes the power source and the shelter electrolyzes air into water, grows algae and produces oxygen before any humans arrive, a preview of how the future home might integrate with the Martian climate rather than combat it.
The same logic appears in the underwater habitat Uhab, where the pressure and isolation of the ocean floor are treated as analogues to the pressure and isolation of space, making water an educational environment rather than a barrier. In any case, the condition that makes the place hostile is also the condition on which the plan is built.
view of the Rosenberg Space Habitat
The structure follows the same logic, as the shell shape of the Rosenberg habitat, mathematically positioned between a triangle and a circle, was chosen so that six of these shapes could fit inside a SpaceX Starship cargo bay. The LUNARK habitat folds from transport configuration to its full internal volume. The Dandelion Shelter packs twenty modules into a single Falcon Heavy payload. In any case, the form is the solution to a transportation problem, and the transportation problem is the first design brief.
SAGA Space Architects does not position its projects as a vision of a better future, because each project has already been built, tested and inhabited. Aristotle and Sørensen lived on LUNARK for 60 days in the Arctic. Aristotle spent 48 hours at the bottom of Copenhagen harbor in Uhab. the Mars Lab was developed in the Negev desert and inhabited as part of a living experiment. and FLEXHab is located at the European Astronaut Center, where crews are already training on it. What SAGA Space Architects is building is not a series of renderings. These are now real spaces that could let us into the future of homes off Earth.
the hexagonal structure can be transported outside the Earth
view inside the Rosenberg space habitat
