Holistic Outpost Design for Lunar Lava Tubes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to designing sustainable lunar habitats, emphasizing social, psychological, and cultural factors alongside engineering considerations for future space colonies.

Contribution

It introduces a trans-disciplinary design framework for lunar lava tube habitats, integrating social and cultural aspects to foster thriving, sustainable lunar colonies.

Findings

Highlights importance of social and cultural design factors

Proposes a trans-disciplinary approach to habitat design

Emphasizes design as a mediator for sustainability

Abstract

As the space industry continues its rapid development, humanity is poised to expand beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), seeking to establish permanent presence on the Moon and beyond. While space travel has traditionally been the domain of a small number of highly specialized professionals, a new era of human exploration, involving non-space actors and stakeholders, is now becoming a reality. In spite of this development, most space habitats are still designed for a narrow target group. This paper seeks to address this deficit by rethinking the established design approaches, typically limited to tackling engineering and challenges of human space exploration (such as radiation or hypogravity), by instead adopting an interdisciplinary "big picture" perspective encompassing social, psychological and cultural aspects of future space habitats. By elaborating and reflecting on our concept, this paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of a trans-disciplinary approach to designing thriving sustainable colonies beyond LEO. We demonstrate the potentially key role of design as mediator in advancing macro-strategies promoting thriving existence and sustainable growth. With this approach we tackle big-picture questions about humanity's future and prospects amongst the stars.