Why is ispace sending this little red house to the Moon?

The Japanese space company ispace has announced that it will send a little red house to the Moon as part of its Hakuto-R Mission 2.

The mission will complete a project started by artist Mikael Genberg 25 years ago. Called the Moonhouse, its goal was to put a typical Swedish house on the surface of the Moon.

The model of the house in traditional red-and-white has by now traveled the world and was even taken to the International Space Station (ISS) by Sweden’s first astronaut Christer Fuglesang.

ispace announced that the Moonhouse will complete the payload for Mission 2. It will travel in the bay of the Resilience lander and, secured in the front of the Tenacious rover, will be deployed on the Moon’s surface, thus ending its “epic” journey, the company said.

“The Moonhouse is a fantastic project, and we are incredibly pleased to be part of finally realizing it,” said Julien-Alexandre Lamamy, chief executive of ispace Europe.

“The vision of the artwork merges with our own; to expand our planet and future, and to extend the sphere of human life into space,” Lamamy said.

According to the website of the Moonhouse project, the little red house on the Moon symbolizes humanity's “dreams and ambitions” to expand beyond the known boundaries but also “reminds us of our roots and our home on Earth.”

“By placing something as simple and down-to-earth as a red house in a place as remote, inhospitable and colorless as the moon, Mikael Genberg questions our perception of what is possible and meaningful in the cosmos,” the project’s description read.

A small red house also “forces the viewer to reflect on the scale of our ambitions and what is truly meaningful in our quest to conquer space,” it said.

What else is on the mission?

The Tenacious micro rover, developed by researchers at ispace’s European subsidiary in Luxembourg, is the mission’s main cargo, in addition to various other science experiments.

These include water electrolyzer equipment from Takasago Thermal Engineering, a self-contained module for food production experiments from Euglena, and a deep space radiation probe developed by the National Central University in Taiwan.

Also going to the Moon is a commemorative plaque modeled after the charter of the Universal Century from the Japanese science fiction manga Gundam and created by Bandai Namco Research Institute.

The Resilience lunar lander has been undergoing testing at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center. In the coming weeks, it will be prepared for shipping to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sometime after December.

It is the second time that ispace will attempt to land an uncrewed mission on the Moon. The first Hakuto-R mission, launched in December 2022, failed an attempted lunar landing in April 2023.

Despite crashing, it made history as the furthest a privately funded spacecraft had ever traveled, completing a journey of 1,400,000 kilometers (870,000 miles).

“This the next step for ispace and the Resilience lander, leading to our second attempt to land on the Moon and explore beyond,” said Ryo Ujiie, a chief technical officer at ispace.

The firm has picked an area near the center of Mare Frigoris, or Sea of Cold, in the Moon’s northern hemisphere as a primary landing site for Resilience. A projected landing date is yet to be announced.