Project description
Designing sustainable habitats for astronauts
As humanity prepares to return to the Moon for long-term exploration, ensuring astronaut safety and well-being in the hostile environment is paramount. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ArchiSpace project will design and construct prototypes of essential infrastructure components (such as walls and living spaces) for extraterrestrial settlements. By using planetary analogue environments for testing ArchiSpace is pioneering a novel interdisciplinary approach, combining geology, space science and architecture. This collaboration aims to establish architectural standards and prototypes that prioritise low-impact, cost-effective operations while employing in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) materials. Ultimately, ArchiSpace not only advances lunar and Martian settlement strategies but also proposes environmentally sustainable practices applicable on Earth.
Objective
In this decade we aim to come back to the Moon to stay. It is therefore crucial to develop reliable and safe settlements that adequately protect astronauts physical and mental well-being from all possible threats that the hostile environment of extraterrestrial space presents. ArchiSpace aims to design and build sub-systems prototypes (e.g. walls, roofs, living spaces, etc.) of human infrastructures to be built on planetary surfaces, which will be tested in planetary analogue environments. This project represents the first effort, to the best of our knowledge, to use environmental and geological setting analogues as a base to define architectural constraints, sketch design and prototypes to be used in future space human settlements. Archispace is pioneering a new fields of interdisciplinary and intersectoral research in Europe by bridging geology/space sciences and architecture/space architecture. Geology/space science is crucial because the subsurface plays a fundamental role in the selection of the landing sites and the location of 'human-focused' habitats. Architecture/space architecture has a key role in designing comfortable, safe and functional habitats. Our complementary partners are leaders in their respective sectors and hold the necessary know-how and/or technology level to achieve the Archispace objectives. In addition, the human settlements to be developed will involve (new) low impact, low-cost and light operations and ISRU materials. This planetary green approach could also be applied on Earth. The project will create, through the planned secondments, common standards, methods and prototypes for the development of space bases on Moon and Mars in the future; which will be tested in three joint field activities (e.g. in Morocco analogues sites). Thus, Archispace promotes an innovative international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary research and innovation collaboration that can contribute to Europe's competitiveness and growth.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyplanetary sciencesnatural satellites
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-SE - HORIZON TMA MSCA Staff ExchangesCoordinator
65128 Pescara
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.