The Moonhouse - Sweden's Red Cottage on the Moon

[00:00:00]America may have been the first country to put a man on the moon, but Sweden is going to be the first country to put a house on the moon. Feeling confused?

[00:00:09]Yeah, I guess you should be. This is a tale about a strange man with a strange obsession. It's a tale about a project that's taken more than 25 years and it's cost more than $10 million. This is the tale of the Moonhouse.

[00:00:34]On January 15, 2025, a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida carrying the moonlander Resilience. On board Resilience is the Luna Rover Tenacious. And on board Tenacious is a small traditional red and white painted Swedish cottage.

[00:00:55][Music] That's the moon house, and it's scheduled to land on the moon on June 5th around 700 p.m. Swedish time, just a few hours before the Swedish national day on June 6th. I'm not sure if it was planned that way or if it's just a lucky coincidence. The launch was performed by the Japanese company, Inc. using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The payload was positioned in low Earth orbit and it has to wait several months before a moon landing can be attempted. So, it's been a long waiting time for the next step in this mission. And I bet that there's a lot of people waiting anxiously for the landing date in June. But I would assume that the artist Mikl Gianb is the person who's most nervous right now.

[00:01:47]Mik Gian is a Swedish artist who was born in 1963 and he's been involved in a lot of pretty strange projects. A while ago, I made a video about the strangest hotels in Sweden and two of Mikli's projects were included in that list. Hotel Hakbet, the woodpecker hotel, is located 13 m up in a tree in a park in the town of Vestados. And oops Hotel can also be found in Vestto. It's a house that appears to have sunk into the water, at least half of it. Close to oops Hotel, you can also find Hotel Utin or Hotel Utter In. It's an underwater hotel. That sounds pretty impressive until you realize that it's in Sweden.

[00:02:32]So all you can see is murky water and some ugly gray brown fish swim by. But he's also made an underwater hotel called the Manta Underwater Room in Tanzania. I imagine that the view is a little bit better in that hotel. He was also planning on making a glass hotel in the middle of a waterfall that would be called Hotel Forel, but that project appears to have been shut down in 2023, unfortunately. But none of those projects can compare with the scope of the moonhouse.

[00:03:13]In 1999, Mik G and Barry got a pretty insane idea. When normal people look up at the moon, they can experience a lot of different thoughts. They might think about how beautiful the moon is. Or maybe they get a sense of scale when they think about our place in the cosmos. Or maybe they say, "That's not a moon, it's a space station." But Mikl G and Barry thought, "hm, that moon would look pretty nice with a Swedish cottage on it." At first, it seems like it's a really stupid idea, and probably at second and third glance, too. But there's something appealing about it as well, combining something so mundane, so typically Swedish as a red cottage with the moon. Red houses with white trim are extremely common in Sweden. You can see them everywhere if you take a drive in the more rural areas of Sweden. And that probably inspired Mikuel Gian Barry. He wanted to combine the downto-earth simplicity of a Swedish house with a cold inhospity of the moon. It's thoughtprovoking. It brings a bit of the earth to the moon. And it also hints at humanity's ambition to one day reach out into outer space and make a new home there. But there's a big difference between having a cool idea and actually making it happen. Four years after he got the idea, Mikuel Yanberry was having talks with the Swedish space agency to bring the project to life. They were positive about the idea and it sparked a lot of curiosity. But the problem was how to finance a project like this. The years passed and Mikl Y and Barry continued to pursue the idea and there were many people who were interested in the project. Swedish aerospace engineers discussed how they could implement the technical details and the embryo for a lunar lander was developed at Maladolan University. A support group with many prominent Swedish political figures was established and things were actually looking promising. By now, the project had gotten several sponsors who wanted to finance it. Millions of Swedish crew were poured into this slightly insane lunar endeavor. But then disaster struck. 2008's financial crisis put an end to all the sponsors and the whole project was put on hold. But it wasn't the end of the moonhouse because Mik and Barry had created a spark of curiosity that simply wouldn't die out.

[00:05:54]After the sponsors backed out, there was still an attempt to get a money for the moonhouse through crowdfunding. Mikl Jian Bry along with many others did a lot of publicity stunts to generate interest for the project. They brought a paper model of the moonhouse to the Great Wall of China, for example. and Christ Fugly, Sweden's most well-known astronaut, was present at the opening of a moonhouse art installation in Vest.

[00:06:20]For some reason, that art installation was assassinated with explosives.

[00:06:25]Someone really didn't want to see that house on the moon. The most famous of Mik Yenber's publicity stunts is probably when he placed a red cottage on top of the Globe Arena in Stockholm. The idea was to illustrate how the house could look on the moon since the globe arena is also a big white sphere and of course to drum up excitement and financing for the project. The initial idea was that the house that was on the globe arena should be the house that was sent to the moon, but that was simply not feasible. Sending things to the moon costs a lot of money. A lot of money.

[00:07:01]The house on top of the globe arena was simply too big. So once they finally got closer to making the moonhouse a reality, they had to scale down things quite a bit. Mikuel Yian B's first vision was to have a full-size house on the moon, but that was absolutely not realistic. A decade later, the ambition was to have a smaller house on the moon.

[00:07:23]The house that was on top of the Globe Arena had an area of 12 square m. But that's not quite how big the moonhouse ended up becoming in the end. Not by far. Once financing actually got sorted out, the moon house was pretty small. In fact, the house that's going to the moon is only 6x 12x 10 cm and it weighs 100 g. It's not exactly the fulls size house that was imagined at first, but it is a house. Even though it would be a tight squeeze even for a mouse to live there.

[00:07:58][Music] But let's get back to the financing.

[00:08:03]Sponsors and crowdfunding had failed, but Miguel Yian was still determined to make the moonhouse happen. In 2021, he collected a group of friends and associates together at oops hotel, one of his other projects. Mikuel Yian together with aerospace engineers and other backers presented their latest idea for how to make the moonhouse happen. They would create a moonhouse company that people could invest in and they would pay for room aboard a Japanese moon lander that would be launched by a SpaceX rocket. And that's essentially what happened given a couple of other mishaps. The moonlander was called Resilience or more formally Hakuto R mission 2 and they launched on a Falcon 9 rocket in January this year.

[00:08:51]But getting to that point required a lot of luck.

[00:08:55][Music] The Moonhouse Company is a privatelyowned company with around 70 different backers. They collected a fair bit of money, but not nearly enough to simply walts up to a space agency and buy a spot at any rocket. The last piece of the puzzle was a man called Teshi Hakamada. Teeshi Hakamada founded ice, Inc. in Japan, a company with a vision to not just put a house on the moon, but a whole city there called Moon Valley by 2040. Even with grand visions like that, it appears that the Moonhouse is still creating a spark of curiosity because Taeshi heard about Miguel's project and reached out to him. In September 2024, the ice company held a press conference where they presented their plans for the Hakuto 2 or Resilience launch. They showed off a lunar rover called Tenacious and they also showed how Tenacious would be carrying a small red cottage that it would place on the moon.

[00:09:58]The moonhouse was finally happening and it was all because of shared visions of houses on the moon by Teshi Hakamada and Mikuel Yian. Even if the Moonhouse is a lot smaller than Moon Valley will [Music] be, the Moonhouse is scheduled to land on June 5th, 2025, sometime around 7:30 p.m. Swedish time. If all goes well, there will soon be a small red Swedish cottage in the middle of Marrioris on the moon, and it will remain there for millions of years, or at least until Moon Valley requires more space and demolishes the tiny little house.

[00:10:41]There's still a lot of things that can go wrong, but it's amazing that the Moonhouse has gotten this far. It's been a 27-year long dream, and hundreds of people have been involved. It might be a bit of a silly dream, but I'm still very impressed by the art project itself and by the process of how they've gotten so far. But it might actually be a project that ends with a prison sentence instead of a triumph. According to space law, and yes, apparently there is something called space law. The Swedish government needs to give approval for all private Swedish space endeavors. Mikl Gianbar sent in a request for the moonhouse on October 2024, but it hasn't actually been approved yet. So in theory, if his request is not approved in well any day now, then he could face up to a year in prison for unlawful space activities. So I guess that we'll see if the Moonhouse lands successfully in a couple of days and if Miguel Yian Barry manages to stay out of prison.

[00:11:48]And that's about it for this video about the Moonhouse, a pretty insane art project by Mikuel Yelbury. I hope you found it as interesting as I did. Like and subscribe, but most importantly, have a great day.