first ever tiny red house on the moon set to land soon

Tiny red house on the moon to land in june 2025

The dubbed first-ever house on the moon, named The Moonhouse, expects to land on June 5th, 2025, at 9:24pm CET time. It’s a tiny red house designed as a traditional Swedish cottage, and the project of the artist Mikael Genberg. It launched around January 2025, attached to the lunar rover TENACIOUS. After roaming around the space for over four months aboard the Japanese lunar lander RESILIENCE, the artwork is about to do a soft landing in Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold. It’s not the first time that the team sent a tiny red house to the moon.

Back in 2023, the Japanese exploration company ispace conducted a similar mission with the same sculptural artwork by the Swedish artist. It didn’t touch down successfully. This time around, the artist, who has worked with a team of engineers for the project, hopes that it lands safely on the Moon. Once the lander touches down, the rover is to be deployed so it can scout the moon’s surface for an ideal site to leave the tiny red house. Antoine Bocquier, rover pilot and senior space system engineer at ispace, says that the maneuvering is remotely controlled from Earth. ‘I will operate the rover to identify a location that is both stable and symbolically meaningful,’ he says.

The Moonhouse and TENACIOUS | images courtesy of the European Astronaut Center (Cologne) of the European Space Agency (ESA), unless stated otherwise

The moonhouse by mikael genberg is decades in the making

The Moonhouse may claim the dubbed first-ever tiny red house on the moon only when it has landed and been positioned safely on the surface on June 5th, 2025. The artist Mikael Genberg has always had the dream of having his artwork be on the moon. It started in 1999 when he imagined planting a simple red house on its surface. Two and a half decades later, it is set to come true, backed by a team of engineers who help him realize the dream. The red cottage is an homage to the traditional homes in Sweden. For the artist, building a miniature version of it that might land on the moon means reminding himself, and the viewers, of one’s roots, the origins.

There’s more of a poetic undertone to it. It’s not about politics or pure science (although there needs to be engineering involved to make it happen). The wait has now begun on the fate of the tiny red house setting up a temporary home on the moon. Mikael Genberg’s house has also traveled around the world. It has been up in trees, underwater, and on top of the Globe arena. It has also visited the Great Wall of China and the International Space Station. It even flew 400 kilometers above Earth as a companion to Sweden’s first astronaut, Christer Fuglesang. Its next stop, then, is the moon, hoping to touch down safely this time after its 2023 attempt.

the dubbed first-ever house on the moon, named The Moonhouse, expects to land on June 5th, 2025