Project Lunar
Concept | Spatial | Environmental
During my final year of University we were invited to work on projects based on briefs provided by the RSA Student Design Awards. The brief this project responding to was “The Future Workplace Brief” which asked the question of how we could interpret and predict the human working environments and challenges we would therefore face in the future.
The Interpretation
Working on this brief gave me the opportunity to analyze the potential avenues that civilization may take in the future by considering socioeconomic issues, government projections and predicted technological advancements. I wanted to create and capture a picture of the lives that individuals in the year 2050 might be living. It was hard to isolate and generalize individual lives in a population that’s predicted to be 9 billion people by 2050 but during my research I discovered the leaps that space travel and tourism were making at the time and decided to isolate a population of 200 people on the moon.
Solution
I created the fiction Planetary Federal Space Agency (PFSA), an initiative of global scientists to further the human races research into space travel. The base self funds using the abundant amount of Helium-3 that are trapped on the moon’s surface along and manufacturing materials that can only be produced in zero gravity environments. It is also a secondary launcing point to further planets, greatly reducing travel times as the ships require much less fuel to reach much greater speeds in the reduced gravity.
The proposed amount of people to create a sustainable colony that promotes enough genetic diversity is 160 people. This is theorised by anthropologist John Moore from the University of Florida where his research dictates that with social engineering the number could be as low as 80 people. I decided to focus on a larger colony of 200 people as human relationships are volatile and unpredictable to a degree with separations, incompatibility and adultary. The number could also be reduced as the PFSA 1 (the first lunar base, modelled in the image) is not necessarily for permanent settlers.