European Lunar Base Concepts 2003-01-2652

Propelled by the renewed international interest in returning to the Moon, an international consortium organized the first European Lunar Base Design Workshop in the summer of 2002. The objective of this Workshop was to propose new design concepts for human and robotic exploration of the Moon and move beyond the outdated ‘man-in-a-can’ genre of space architecture. The Workshop introduced a new genre in lunar base architecture, deriving from bold, innovative and unconventional thinking. It generated experimental concepts for sustainable, advanced, user-oriented architectures for future lunar bases. The Workshop participants chose diverse moon mission scenarios including ice mining, solar cell production, lunar telescopes, He3 mining, research and commercial operations.

This paper will present the most important explorations and concepts from this Workshop. It will discuss the rationale behind adopting a multidisciplinary and multicultural design studio approach. It will present a summary of four of the seven designs generated at the Workshop and will then go on to discuss in detail the remaining three concepts as Case Studies. The objective of these Case Studies will be to showcase three completely different architectural paradigms: (1) a habitat buried under lunar regolith, (2) a stationary surface habitat, and (3) a mobile habitat.