Inside a 1,700-square-foot structure at NASA‘s Johnson Space Center in Houston, four people are currently 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 19th, 2025, and will remain inside until October 31st, 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.
Mars Dune Alpha, BIG, ICON | image © BIG
Mars Dune Alpha, BIG, ICON | image © BIG
PRIVACY BECOMES INFRASTRUCTURE
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.
LUNARK, SAGA Space Architects
LUNARK (interior), SAGA Space Architects
THERE IS NO ‘AWAY’
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.
Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (MELiSSA), European Space Agency, plant culture at BIOS, Krasnoyarsk
A HOUSE HAS TO MAKE ITS OWN SKY
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, which creates 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 air and warmth, architecture still has to produce somewhere people can bear to inhabit.
LUNARK (interior), SAGA Space Architects
THE PEOPLE INSIDE HAVE TO KEEP IT RUNNING
NASA’s CHAPEA experiments deliberately make the house troublesome. The current crew operates with limited resources and extended isolation, a simulated 22-minute communication delay, and equipment failures inserted into the mission by researchers.
During a simulated loss-of-signal period earlier this year, the four inhabitants spent two weeks working without contact with mission control, relying on procedures and the resources already available inside. Habitat maintenance sits beside scientific work as part of the experiment because a distant home has to survive its own breakdowns.
That changes the design brief in small ways. Components need to be reachable. Storage has to make sense. Spare parts and technical information need somewhere to live. SAGA even placed a 3D printer inside LUNARK so the inhabitants could fabricate tools as needs emerged, reducing the amount of equipment that had to travel with the habitat from the beginning.
A house designed for extreme distance starts to favor systems its residents can understand and intervene in. Maintenance moves from the background of architecture into the space itself.
BUILDING WITH WHAT IS ALREADY THERE
Before anyone can live on the Moon or Mars, the basic economics of transport transform the architecture. Every kilogram sent from Earth comes with enormous logistical demands, which has pushed researchers toward structures that use material already present at the destination. In a study developed with ESA, Foster + Partners proposed sending a pressurized inflatable module to the Moon and covering it with a cellular shell printed from lunar regolith.
The outer mass would provide protection from micrometeoroids and radiation while reducing the amount of construction material launched from Earth. NASA and ICON are exploring a related principle through the Olympus construction system, which is being developed to use local lunar and Martian resources as building material.
For architecture on Earth, lunar regolith may seem remote from the apartment, townhouse, or suburban home. The underlying constraint is familiar. A space habitat begins from the premise that resources are finite and that the people inside remain connected to what they consume.
Water and energy have limits. Materials and labor do too. Waste stays close enough to become a design problem, while maintenance becomes shared work. Mars simply removes many of the external systems that allow a terrestrial house to appear self-contained. Seen from that distance, the home begins to look different: a small inhabited system connected to larger cycles, with architecture mediating how much passes through it and how much can circle back.
NASA, Olympus, BIG, ICON | image © BIG
3D-printed lunar base, European Space Agency, Foster + Partners
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.
The post when home becomes life support: designing habitats for mars and the moon appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.