Designing Homes That Must Become Life Support for Mars and the Moon

Inside a 1,700-square-foot structure at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, four people are spending 378 days pretending Earth is 140 million miles away. Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthew Montgomery, and James Spicer entered Mars Dune Alpha on October 19, 2025, and will remain inside until October 31, 2026, as part of NASA’s second Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, mission. Designed by BIG and 3D printed by ICON, the habitat gives each person a private room while fitting in work areas, communal spaces, a medical station, and places to grow food. The crew exercises, maintains the habitat, cultivates crops, and heads outside for simulated Mars walks across an enclosed field of red sand. NASA adds resource restrictions and equipment failures to the experiment, along with communication delays designed to approximate the distance between Mars and Earth.

Mars Dune Alpha looks futuristic enough, with thick ribbed walls produced by ICON’s Vulcan printing system and a long, low interior divided into zones for living and work. Yet the more interesting experiment is domestic. A house on Earth connects almost invisibly to enormous networks beyond its walls. Water arrives through pipes, waste disappears beneath the floor, energy comes through the building, and replacement parts move through supply chains. A habitat on Mars would have to compress much of that supporting world into the architecture itself. The distinction between home and infrastructure begins to collapse.

Within Mars Dune Alpha, BIG separated crew quarters from collective zones and varied ceiling heights across the plan, giving occupants some spatial change during a year spent almost entirely indoors. NASA describes the layout as deliberately separating living and working areas, while each crew member receives an individual room. These are modest design moves by terrestrial standards. But under prolonged confinement, they become part of the habitat’s performance. Privacy consumes valuable volume, yet eliminating it creates another kind of pressure.

SAGA Space Architects explored the same problem at an even smaller scale with LUNARK, an experimental lunar habitat deployed in northern Greenland in 2020. Architects Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sørensen lived inside its 17.2-cubic-meter deployed interior for 60 days, isolated in an Arctic landscape where temperatures dropped far below freezing. The two private sleeping pods sit above the main room, squeezing personal territory into padded enclosures barely larger than the body. Acoustic insulation separates them from the shared interior below, while small spaces for personal belongings give each occupant a territory of his own. When every cubic meter has structural and transport consequences, privacy becomes something architecture has to actively make room for.

Space habitation becomes stranger once waste enters the conversation, because a settlement separated from Earth by months of travel has few opportunities to throw anything out. The European Space Agency has spent decades developing MELiSSA, its Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative, around the idea of shrinking some of Earth’s ecological cycles into a controlled artificial ecosystem. Organic waste moves through biological processes while carbon dioxide becomes an input elsewhere in the loop. Photosynthetic organisms help regenerate oxygen and recover water. Higher plants introduce edible biomass into the system. The crew itself forms one compartment within the cycle.

The engineering becomes complicated very quickly, involving bioreactors and filtration systems alongside algae and plants. Architecturally, the principle is much simpler: there is no real ‘away.’ The bathroom and kitchen become entangled with mechanical systems and growing space because matter keeps circulating through the habitat. What leaves the human body remains part of the home’s resource equation. On Earth, domestic architecture tends to conceal this metabolism behind walls and beneath streets. Closed-loop habitation pulls it back into the room, making consumption physically legible at the scale of a household.

During the LUNARK expedition, the landscape outside gradually lost the familiar cues that organize human time, and the architects eventually went weeks without seeing direct sunlight. SAGA covered much of the habitat ceiling with programmable light panels that changed spectrum and intensity across the day, creating an artificial circadian cycle inside the small enclosure. The system produced an interior sunrise in the sleeping pods and continued shifting overhead as the hours passed. The ceiling effectively became environmental equipment to supply an experience that conventional architecture usually receives for free through a window.

These experiments complicate the familiar image of space architecture as a problem of pressure vessels and radiation shielding. Keeping a human body functioning is only one part of habitation over months or years. Light and sound affect how a room feels, alongside temperature and texture. Variation becomes especially valuable inside an environment where the view, schedule, food, and company may change very little. LUNARK’s padded sleeping pods and glowing ceiling suggest that sensory design can become a form of life-support too. Once an extreme habitat secures a safe atmosphere, the next challenge is making a confined interior feel like a place where people can actually live.

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Evan Emerson

Political Correspondent

Evan Emerson covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Cronkite. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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