On January 15, SpaceX ‘s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, propelling Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander and ispace’s Resilience lander on their way to the Moon. On board the Resilience lander is a very unusual object: a toy Swedish house with white trim, called the “Moon House,” also designed, as the name suggests, to fly to the moon. As described in detail on Mikael Henberg’s website, the artist has been dreaming of placing his Moon House on the lunar surface for a quarter of a century, and now this dream is closer to being realized than ever.
“What does it mean? What is the meaning? What is the purpose?” Henberg asked in a video message. He had a very simple answer: “It’s art.” And while he says that art does not carry meaning or purpose, it does carry questions.
“By placing something as simple and mundane as a red house in a place as remote, inhospitable, and colorless as the moon, Mikael Henberg questions our idea of what is possible and meaningful in space,” reads the project description on the Moonhouse website. “In addition, Moonhouse has poetic overtones. It reminds us of our roots and our home on Earth, while symbolizing our dreams and ambitions to explore and push the boundaries of our known world.”
Henberg’s little red houses have already appeared around the world in trees, underwater, on the Great Wall of China, and even on the International Space Station. In a few months, Japan’s Resilience lander is due to land in the northern regions of the Moon’s near side. The lunar house is already attached to the Tenacious micromotor, which, according to the company, will depart from the lander to explore the lunar surface.
Then “it should release the house, take some photos, and leave it alone to stand there for thousands and thousands, maybe millions of years,” Henberg explained in the video. If all goes according to plan, Moonhouse will not only be the first art project on the moon, but also technically the first building on the moon (that we know of). Since the project’s inception, Henberg has raised between $620,000 and $888,000 to fund the project, including the flight, according to the Associated Press.
The Moon House is currently traveling with other cargoes, including a food production experiment, a probe to measure radiation in deep space, equipment for a water electrolyzer, a commemorative alloy plate from a Japanese entertainment and engineering group, and, of course, the Tenacious rover.
In the end, the first building on the moon is not the structure we all envisioned – but can we really rule out the possibility that it is the perfect size for some extraterrestrial life there? I think not.
