Space is the place?

Two encouraging developments this week in the quest to establish a permanent human presence in space. The Times records that data from India’s lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 shows large quantities of water on the surface of the moon. This discovery increases the possibility that astronauts could be based on the Moon and use the water found there to drink, extract oxygen to breathe and use hydrogen as fuel. Meanwhile, Building Magazine reports that Norman Foster and Partners are part of a consortium hoping to investigate the possibility of adapting materials found in space for building purposes.

Foster has already designed the world’s first spaceport currently under construction in New Mexico - primarily as a base for Richard Branson’s commercial space flight venture Virgin Galactic. His latest bid is to the European Space Agency which wants to set up a programme for robotic and human exploration of the solar system, and to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon. It hopes that adapting materials found in space for building purposes could eventually help establish a more permanent presence on the Moon.

Jonathan Glancey welcomes Foster’s bid, and rounds up some space-age architecture from Archigram onwards. But, inadvertently, he confirms that so far the space age has had only a limited role in influencing the architectural and urban future. For example, whether or not you admire the soap-sud structure of Grimshaw’s Eden Project, it’s worth asking where it sits with the broader human objective of conquering space. As Glancey points out, the aim of the Eden Project is ‘protecting and nurturing plant life’. In the time since the Apollo flights to the Moon, stills of earth shot from space have often been interpreted as a sign of how vulnerable life is on earth. And, as we’ve become more anxious over life on planet earth, not only has the desire to explore space receded, but many of those who still do want to go into space are no longer motivated by a project of discovery. For example the idea of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was to stream a continuous live colour image of the Earth from a million miles out in space. For environmentalists like Al Gore, the benefit of live footage of the whole Earth broadcast continuously over the internet would be to provide a powerful modern reminder of the fragility of our home planet. The Eden Project might look like a bubble city from another planet, but its motivations are similarly earthbound.

James Woudhuysen - who is speaking at Minimum… or Maximum Cities? on the future of energy - argues that we need to rekindle our appetite for space and go back to the moon - and beyond. “To want to go into space is human. It is a good in itself, an expression of humanity’s desire to conquer the unknown, discover more about our universe.”