Thales Alenia Space has been awarded an Italian Space Agency (ASI) contract to continue the development of its Multi-Purpose Habitat, which the agency hopes will be the first permanent outpost on the Moon.
In September 2020, ASI and NASA signed a joint statement of intent to cooperate to advance the goals of the Artemis programme. An ASI press release at the time explained that the cooperation would include but not be limited to: “the provision of crew habitation capabilities on the surface of the Moon and associated technologies to enable short-duration stays for crews on the Moon.” It would, however, take another two years before a solid plan to execute this planned cooperation would emerge.
In June 2022, ASI signed a bilateral cooperation agreement with NASA to conduct a preliminary design of the “Lunar Surface Multi-Purpose Habitation Module.”
On 23 November, Thales Alenia Space announced that ASI had entrusted it with continuing to develop the Multi-Purpose Habitat. The award followed the completion of a NASA element initiation review, which was completed in mid-October. The next major milestone in the development of the Multi-Purpose Habitat is a mission concept review that is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2024.
Although precious few details about the Multi-Purpose Habitat are known, an image that accompanied a Thales Alenia Space press release shows a cylindrical module with four telescopic legs. In addition to a single deployable solar array that extends above the module, additional solar arrays are fitted to the roof. If we assume the flag in the image is a standard size of 1.8 metres, the module has a length of around 10 metres. This, however, assumes that a fair amount of artistic license wasn’t utilized to create the image.
