As NASA joins forces with the European Space Agency to master plan an astronaut base on the lunar South Pole, one ESA-backed designer has proposed robotically constructing a fantastical Moon Temple open to all the world’s spacefarers.
After being embedded in ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, designer Jorge Mañes Rubio has sketched out blueprints for a cosmic citadel as a centerpiece for Moon Base Alpha, and as a celestial beacon of humanity’s expanding spacefaring civilization.
“The original space race was driven by competition between the superpowers,” Rubio told me in an interview.
Now, with the new space race, and a Big Bang-like explosion of national aerospace agencies and independent space outfits and explorers, all aiming to touch down on the Moon, he says, “There is a chance to create a utopia.”
A cosmopolitan, United Nations of astronauts gathering inside the Moon Temple could collectively map out a new cosmic culture, just as the citizens of Athens met in temples and agoras across the classical Greek city to co-design their democratic and cultural future.
The idea for a Moon Temple struck him, Rubio says, when he was ensconced inside the European Space Agency’s leading-edge ACT think tank, which explores advances in technology and science, and in culture and civilization, that could supercharge the next stage of human space exploration.
In an epiphany, Rubio says, he realized that Moon trekkers, hailing from around the world, would need to create “a new cosmic vision or culture” to survive and unite on a floating orb more than 300,000 kilometers distant from the home planet.
The Moon Temple could become the unifying symbol of a new universal civilization, he predicts, and in the process begin transforming the Earth’s competing cultures.
Jared Isaacman, the first independent space pilot selected to head up and guide NASA during the second Moon race, has sketched out plans for the first astronauts to alight on the southern tip of the silver sphere in 2028.
A year later, Isaacman says, they will “start shaping a functioning base” and assembling a habitat on the surreally illuminated pole, where some peaks in the wild terrain are perpetually sunlit and nearby cavernous craters are hidden in eternal shadows.
Isaacman is regarded as a spaceflight icon across the NewSpace sector after piloting two sensational orbital missions while testing out experimental spacesuits developed by SpaceX, along with a specially adapted Dragon capsule to conduct the world’s first spacewalk by an independent aeronaut.
In an earlier interview, Isaacman told me that these SpaceX EVA suits could “be a stepping stone to the millions of spacesuits for the Moon and Mars travelers of the future.”
All of the tech demos he conducted during the twin missions, he said, were aimed at ultimately “making humanity a multi-planetary species.”
He added that while it’s difficult to predict how Space Race II might change the course of human progress across the globe, “I’m hopeful the impact will be a more unified civilization.”
Rubio says he has a similar aim, to intermix all the world’s peoples into a pro-peace spacefaring super-culture, with the Moon Temple an icon of that quest.
The colossal domed architecture of the temple, he says, would be impossible to construct on Earth, because it would collapse under its own weight. Only on the Moon, whose mass generates just one-sixth the gravity of the Earth, could the temple live for centuries into the future.
The Moon Temple features an immense arched oculus facing the horizon, precisely positioned so that the Earth seems to float across the skyline, and then gives way, every two weeks, to a star-filled sky.
The design echoes the fantastical installations called Skyspaces that American artist-architect James Turrell has designed around the world, with each featuring a sky-facing oculus that becomes a window onto the constellations that swirl above as twilight turns to night.
With Rubio’s temple, the entire Earth, and then the Milky Way, becomes part of the artwork, representing humanity’s origins and its future as a space civilization, he says.
Rubio says his inspiration for the design and goals of the Moon Temple was sparked by the utopian calls to construct a cosmopolitan Moon Village launched by Jan Woerner, onetime Director General of the European Space Agency.
The visionary Woerner, the first space agency leader to promote the creation of an idyllic inter-civilization lunar enclave, told me in an earlier interview that an expanding Moon Village could evolve into a cutting-edge showcase not just for technological breakthroughs like advanced telescopes, but also for collaboration across a worldwide mix of astronauts in a model space society that could portend a more pacific future back on Earth.
While crisscrossing Europe with calls for spacefarers, coders, inventors and architects to join this Moon Village, Woerner often brandished prints of a Moon Base that ESA co-designed with the British architecture studio Foster + Partners, featuring a circle of futuristic lunar habitats that would be 3D printed by a brigade of advanced constructor robots.
Across ESA’s robotic fabrication labs, Dr. Woerner told me, “We are developing the technology.”
Meanwhile, his vision of a titanic transnational coalition of spacefaring nations to build and populate an ever-expanding Moon Village is now being echoed by NASA.
While unveiling the Artemis Accords – the American crafted guidelines for building a Moon outpost – then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said: “Artemis will be the broadest and most diverse international human space exploration program in history.”
The Artemis global coalition, which now allies 70 nations, “will create a safe, peaceful, and prosperous future in space for all of humanity,” Bridenstine said.
Meanwhile, temple architect Jorge Rubio says that space scientist Jan Woerner’s “idea of the Moon Village is a very utopian model.”
“This is basically a call to action for every space agency, every independent spaceflight outfit.”
“The Moon Temple is a symbol of this utopia.”
While conducting research for the design of the temple, he says, he “looked at ancient civilizations that built temples that also functioned as celestial observatories.”
He wants the temple to reflect the “universal and utopian features of civilizations across the ages.”
“Ancient civilizations recognized the interconnectedness of everything – I want to go back to the idea that we are part of everything,” the entire cosmos.
The Moon Temple, while an icon of the emerging space civilization, “also acts as an observatory, with a liquid mirror telescope.”
Yet the temple alone will not signal the successful launch of a global space culture.
“The whole idea of creating a new cosmic culture will take some time,” Rubio predicts, “this will take a global movement.”
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has created a virtual exhibition of Rubio’s Moon Temple on its website, but without predicting when it might actually be constructed. Rubio says he’s also building a VR version of the citadel that young technophiles worldwide, donning headsets, will be able to plug into.
And in Amsterdam, he adds, the Museum Het Schip is set to unveil the Moon Temple in the upcoming exhibition “Bright New World. Imagination Takes Power,” a preview of the dreamlike utopias that are being designed for the future.