I must have been about twelve years old
when my dad took me to an exhibition on space,
not far from here, in Brussels.
The year was about - I think it was 1988, so it was the end of the Cold War.
There was a bit of an upmanship going on between the Americans and the Russians
bringing bits to that exhibition.
NASA brought a big blown-up space shuttle,
but the Russians, they brought a MIR space station.
It was actually the training module, you could go inside and check it all out.
It was the real thing,
where the buttons and the wires were,
where the astronauts were eating, where they were working.
And when I came home, first thing I did, I started drawing spaceships.
These weren't science fiction spaceships.
No,
they were actually technical drawings,
they were cutaway sections of what a structure would be made out of,
where the wires were, where the screws were.
So, fortunately,
I didn't become a space engineer, but I did become an architect.
So, these are some of the projects I have been involved with
over the last decade and a half.
All these projects are quite different, quite different shapes,
and it is because they are built in different environments
they have different constraints.
And I think, design becomes really interesting
when you get really harsh constraints.
Now, these projects have been all over the world, right?
A few years ago, this map wasn't good enough, it was too small.
We had to add this one because we were going to do
a project on the Moon for the European Space Agency.
They asked us to design a Moon habitat,
and one on Mars with NASA -
the competition to look at a habitation on Mars.
Whenever you go to another place as an architect
and try to design something,
you look at the local architecture, the precedents that are there.
On the Moon, that is kind of difficult, of course,
because there is only this, there is only the Apollo missions.
The last time we went there, I wasn't even born yet.
And we only spent about three days there.
For me, that is kind of a long camping trip, isn't it,
but a rather expensive one.
The tricky thing,
when you are going to build on another planet or on the Moon,
is how to get it there.
First of all, to get a kilogram,
for example, to the Moon surface,
it will cost about 200,000 dollars.
Very expensive.
So, you want to keep it very light.
Second: space. Space is limited.
This is the Ariane 5 rocket.
The space you have there is about four and a half meters by seven meters,
not that much.
So, it needs to be an architectural system
that is both compact, or compactible, and light.
I think I've got one right here.
It is very compact and it is very light.
And actually, this is one I made earlier.
There's one problem with it,
that inflatables are quite fragile,
they need to be protected,
specifically when you go to a very harsh environment like the Moon.
Look at it like this.
The temperature difference on a Moon base could be anything up to 200 degrees.
On one side of the base it could be a 100 degrees Celsius,
and on the other side it could be minus 100 degrees.
You need to protect yourself from that.
The Moon also does not have any magnetic fields,
which means that any radiation -
solar radiation, cosmic radiation - will hit the surface.
We need to protect ourselves from that as well,
protect the astronauts from that.
And then third, but definitely not last,
the Moon doesn't have any atmosphere,
which means any meteorites coming into it
will not get burned up and will hit the surface.
That's why the Moon is full of craters.
Again, we need to protect the astronauts from that.
So what kind of structure do we need?
The best thing is really a cave, because a cave has a lot of mass.
And we need mass, we need mass to protect ourselves from temperatures,
from radiation, and from meteorites.
So, this is how we solved it.
We have indeed the blue part, as you can see,
that is an inflatable for a Moon base.
It gives a lot of living space and a lot of lab space.
And attached to it, you have a cylinder,
and that has all the support structures in it,
all the life support and also the airlock.
And on the top of that, we have a structure -
that domed structure, that protects ourselves, has a lot of mass in it.
Where do we get this material from?
Are we going to bring concrete and cement from Earth to the Moon?
Well, of course not, because it is way too heavy, it's too expensive.
We are going to use local materials.
Local materials is something we do on Earth as well.
Wherever we build, in whatever country we build,
we always look at: what are the local materials here?
The problem with the Moon is: what are the local materials?
Well, there is not that many, we actually have one.
It is moon dust,
or, fancy or scientific name, "regolith," Moon regolith.
Great thing is it is everywhere, right?
The surface is covered with it -
there's about 20 centimeters up to a few meters everywhere.
But how are we going to build with it?
Well, we are going to use a 3D printer.
Whenever I ask any of you what a 3D printer is,
you probably think of something about this size,
and it would print things that are about this size.
Of course, we won't bring a massive 3D printer to the Moon
to print a Moon base.
I am going to use a much smaller device, something like this one here.
This is a small device, a small robot rover that has a little scoop,
and it brings the regolith to the dome,
and then it lays down a thin layer of regolith.
And then you will have the robot solidify it layer by layer
until it creates, after a few months, the full base.
You might have noticed
that it is quite a particular structure that we are printing.
I have got a little example here.
We call this a closed-cell foam structure.
Looks quite natural.
The reason we are using this as a part of that shell structure
is that we only need to solidify certain parts,
which means we have to bring less binder from Earth,
and it becomes much lighter.
This is really not just,
let's say, paper architecture, right?
We wanted to go and test this out, so we went to Italy with this company,
and we tried out to print a mock-up, the real size.
We are also using, well, not moon dust, because that would be --
first of all, there's not a lot of moon dust to do this with.
We used a moon dust simulant.
This is dust that has chemically the same consistency as moon dust.
And we printed it layer by layer.
But you might notice that the block we printed here
is about one and a half tons heavy
and has a much thicker structure than the one I have here.
Well, this is because this one I designed for the Moon,
which has one sixth of the gravity of Earth.
And this one here, of course, is printed on Earth.
So it is much thicker.
That approach of designing something and then covering it
with a protective dome, we also did for our Mars project.
You see here three domes, and you see the printers
printing these dome structures.
Now, there is a big difference between Mars and Moon.
Let me explain it.
This diagram shows you, to scale, the size of Earth and the Moon
and the real distance, about 400 thousand kilometers.
If we then go to Mars -
The distance from Mars to Earth, and this picture here is taken
by the rover on Mars, Curiosity, looking back at Earth.
You can see the little speckle there - that is the Earth,
400 million kilometers away.
The problem with that distance is
that it is a thousand times the distance Earth-Moon, pretty far away,
but there is no direct radio contact
with, for example, the Curiosity rover.
So I cannot teleoperate it from Earth.
I can't say, "Mars rover, go left!"
because that signal will take twenty minutes to get to Mars,
then the rover might go left,
and then it will take another 20 minutes
before it can tell me, "Oh, yeah, I went left."
So, stuff, rovers and robots
are going to have to work autonomously.
The other issue with it is that missions to Mars are highly risky.
We have only seen it a few weeks ago.
What if half of the mission doesn't arrive at Mars, what do we do?
Instead of building just one or two rovers, like we did on the Moon,
we're going to build hundreds of them.
It's a bit like a termites mount,
I would take half of the colony of the termites away,
they would still be able to build the mount.
It might take a little bit longer.
The same here: if half of our rovers or robots don't arrive,
well, it will take a bit longer, but we'll still be able to do it.
Here we even have three different robots.
In the back, you see the digger, it is really good at digging regolith.
Then, we have the transporter,
great at taking regolith and bringing it to the structure.
And the last ones -
the little ones with little legs-
what they do is they sit on a layer of regolith,
microwave it together,
and layer by layer create that dome structure.
We also wanted to try that out,
so we went out on a workshop, and we created
our own swarm of robots.
Here we go.
We built ten of those - it's a small swarm -
and we took six tons of sand, and we tried out how these little robots
would actually be able to move sand around - Earth sand in this case.
They were not teleoperated, right?
Nobody was telling them to go left, go right,
or giving them a pre-described path.
No, they were given a task: move sand from this area to that area.
And if they came across an obstacle, like a rock,
they had to sort it out themselves, or they came across another robot
that'd be able to make decisions.
Or even if half of them fell out, the batteries died,
they still had to be able to finish that task.
Now, I talked about redundancy.
But that was not only with the robots, it was also with the habitat.
On the Mars project, we decided to do three domes.
Because if one didn't arrive, the other two could still form a base.
And that was mainly because each of the domes
actually has a life support system built in the floor,
so they can work independently.
It was also in this project that we started to think a little bit more:
"How is it for an astronaut or cosmonaut to live in a base?"
Again, look at precedence.
Here is the International Space Station.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't really want to live
in that space for six months or a year.
It is really living inside a machine.
Well, maybe science fiction gives us better clues, right, in the movie "Moon."
Often in science fiction you'll see very sleek clinical spaces
and also loads of corridors,
in science fiction, loads of corridors, all the time.
And knowing what we know now,
what we don't have in space is space.
So, it may be not such a good example either.
But I think this is a good example.
This is Halley VI, the British Antarctic Survey,
it is the British base in the Antarctic.
What is interesting here is that the base is in a very harsh climate,
especially in winter.
On top of that, it is very isolated.
It is actually not possible to get evacuated from Halley VI
during winter months.
It's easier to get evacuated from the ISS, International Space Station,
than it is from Halley VI.
So, we went and spoke to people there -
well, not there, the ones that were in London,
who stayed there earlier -
and had long conversations about it with them.
A lot of things came up, and one of the things they mentioned a lot was:
"Well, you know, imagine, we live and also work there.
So, we live and work in the same place; it's like living in your own office."
How does that work?
And they said, they really missed tactile things.
Tactile, what does that mean?
"Look at what we did," they said.
"We put up, we took some crates,
some packaging crates that we had laying around,
some plywoods, put it on the wall,
put some rope around, and we kind of built this thing.
So, it felt a little bit more homey, a bit more tactile."
And tactile was the word they not only used for the wood surfaces,
they also said, "Oh, we're also growing our own lettuce now,
because all the food we have is great, it is frozen or is in tins,
but what we miss is just something crunchy, something tactile."
So, we took these ideas into the interior of our base and, you know,
why not have a wooden floor in a Mars base?
This might not be a plank of wood,
this might be a thin layer of veneer on a top of some carbon fiber boards.
And why not grow some vegetables?
These Mars bases wouldn't be able to sustain themselves with food,
but one could grow some things to get some crunchy lettuce now and then.
Windows, very important.
This is a Cupola, the most popular place in the International Space Station,
designed in 1987, installed in 2010.
Took 23 years, why?
It was not because it was technically so difficult, no.
It was mainly because from a pure technical engineering point of view,
it's not necessary.
But from a human perspective, it is the best place in the space station.
So, we very much took that idea and implemented it in our Moon base,
and had skylights bringing in natural daylight.
And take it also into the Mars base and here in the lab space.
Why not have some natural Mars daylight coming in?
In a way you might think, well, this is pretty crazy.
Why would you as an architect get involved in space,
because it's such a technical field?
Well, I am actually really convinced
that from a creative view or a design view,
you are able to solve really hard and really constrained problems,
and I really feel that there is a place for design and architecture
in projects like interplanetary habitation.
Thank you.
(Applause)