Build a Moon Habitat

All the best space puns apply!

Have you ever tried to make a lunar habitat out of newspaper logs with a bunch of kids? You haven’t lived until you do! Also, please note: someone, at some point, WILL point out that newspaper isn’t a suitable material for lunar habitat design and insulation.

In all seriousness, this activity was a bundle of crazy fun! We filled our entire large meeting room with habitat components (living quarters, laboratory, communications center, Jedi training complex) before our two-hour Monday Makerspace event came to a close. Actually, we’d filled it up long before then, and spent the majority of the final hour staging lunar coups and discussing micrometeorite impacts and best practices for Helium-3 mining. These were five to twelve-year-olds, and they were serious about their engineering. Luckily, I’ve read a fair bit of Kim Stanley Robinson, Andy Weir, and Ian McDonald lately. I’m hip to the in situ offworld colony engineering thing (fictionally, anyway).

A couple of suggestions:

- After demonstrating the best newspaper-rolling techniques, I recommend supplementing with other materials. We had some large cardboard boxes left over from our last CSLP shipment, and these helped build corridors and stiffen some existing structures. We also had a bunch of Mylar sheets leftover from a previous program (you can buy them super cheap in the form of emergency camping blankets), and this material proved to be most beloved of all amongst our lunar engineers. We spent some time discussing the tensile strength and insulating properties of Mylar (BoPET), as well as its use in real-world offworld science projects, including NASA’s space suits.

- If you introduce cardboard into the mix, you’ll need (supervised!) X-ACTO blades or some other means of cutting through without harming little fingers. If you introduce Mylar or something similar, you’ll need scissors. I highly recommend bringing along glue and spare construction or wrapping paper, markers, and other materials for decoration. Just because you’re on the Moon doesn’t mean you can’t upgrade your design with a bit of flair!

- Tape is vital. Lots and lots of tape. Several *kinds* of tape. Newspaper doesn’t respond well to some kinds of tape, however (especially masking tape) so this might provide another moment of instructional opportunity as you discuss tools and material science with your kiddos, as well as economics. Duct tape costs a lot more than packing tape, and it is far more “costly” in terms of weight when lifting materials offworld, but it has better tensile strength, and for now at least it’s pretty much impossible to manufacture plastics on the lunar surface. At what point might a lunar colony think that better materials will be worth the expense? If kids can re-enact “The Last Jedi” with nothing but rolled-up newspaper lightsabers, they’re 100% ready and equipped to take a stab at answering questions like these. As long as they’re having fun, of course!

- We did not make the moon cookies. We did not have the time, and we also have some severe peanut, lactose, and gluten allergies/intolerances. With a bit of experimentation, it should be possible to alter the recipe to suit. We hope to do that in the future and will update our review if we do.

- Be prepared for the inevitable drama as kids beg their parents to somehow jam their habitat structures into the trunks of their vehicles. Demonstrating the break-down (and pack-flat) process with one structure for all of the kids at once will resolve much of the chaos and convince many parents that you are not, in fact, attempting to crowd them out of their own cars. We also had a fair amount of pristine (unused) materials on hand to give out at the end for kids to take home and continue building at home, and almost every family took some.

All in all, the “Build a Moon Habitat” activity requires only that you hang on to last week’s newspapers (at a library of our size, one week’s worth of free local papers proved about perfect) and bring out any leftover recyclables you might have secreted away in various nooks and crannies. And the tape. It takes a fair amount of engagement and explanation to bring the kids on board in the beginning, but once the engineering fever takes hold, this activity has legs.