SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

From the beginning, we strongly believed in human and natural environment as the fundamental basis for the creation of a new habitat. Our thoughts went back to Vitruvius and the Primitive hut that was shown to us in early phase of studying. How to build in a new environment? What to use, where and why?

While researching more and more about the conditions and hazards, it was clear to us that any long-term human presence on the Moon will require protection from surface hazards such as radiation, micrometeorites, temperature amplitude etc. We solved our first sustainable aspect by choosing the existing cave, the Marius hills pit, around 80 meters deep in the west side of Oceanus Procellarum. It is an environment that is naturally protected from the hazards and the extreme temperature differences between the lunar day and night therefore being a favourable environmental condition for a human being.

As we mentioned earlier in the concept phase, we got inspired by another sustainable aspect, water wall life support system. We chose this system because of its integration of the air treatment, solid waste treatment and thermal control recycling all in one. These water wall bags would consist of series of the membrane bags that would be pre-integrated into existing modules and would function via forward osmosis that replicates the processes of the mechanically passive methods in the nature. With an approach of the thermal and osmotic differences, we would avoid many conventional failure prone mechanical systems. It provides 100% reuse of all metabolic waste with gray and black water processing of urine and wash water, air processing for CO2 removal and O2 revitalisation and thermal and humidity control, including of the algae growth that would play an important role in psychological colour scheme and well-being of the astronauts.

Next step was to include the higher plants and finding a way to grow food for a one year mission. In further research we focused on the greenhouse and aquaponics system.