Let's all move to Mars! The space architects shaping our future

Out of this world an impression of the Mars One settlement. Photograph: Mars One/Bryan Versteeg

Fifty years from now, says Brent Sherwood, there will be a different kind of honeymoon on offer. Imagine a hotel with a view thats changing all the time, says the Nasa space architect, where there are 18 sunrises and sunsets every day, where food floats effortlessly into your mouth and where you can have zero-gravity sex. Who wouldnt sign up for that?

Born the same year as Nasa, 1958, Sherwood trained as an architect and aerospace engineer. Having spent the past 25 years working on plans for everything from orbital cities to planetary settlements, he is convinced its only a matter of time before space travel becomes a regular holiday option and were living and working on the moon. Theres only one drawback. Nobody knows how to cook in space, he says. Until you can mix a martini or make an omelette, you cant have a space hotel. No one is going to pay $1m a night and put up with microwave meals.

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As civilian space travel inches closer, from Richard Bransons troubled but persistent Virgin Galactic ambitions to the plucky Dutch attempt to take reality-TV contestants to Mars by 2024, architects are becoming increasingly important. Until now, says Sherwood, space habitats have been about the bare essentials: Whats the research we have to do, whats the equipment we have to carry, and whats the most cost-effective thing we can stick it all in? But as more people travel to space for increasingly long periods of time, their physical environment and its psychological effects are becoming more important.

Surprisingly, the first space station, Skylab, which orbited the Earth from 1973-79, remains by far the most generous habitat ever launched. It was palatial compared with the current International Space Station (ISS), but only because it wasnt purpose-built: it was recycled out of the fuel tank of a huge Saturn V rocket. Thanks to the insistence of designer Raymond Loewy, a tiny porthole was added which became the most popular feature with the astronauts, who were otherwise trapped inside a grim tin can.

That was the biggest volume weve ever had in space, says Sherwood. Since then, the entire US space programme has had to be squeezed through a 14ft hole. And we still dont know how to make big windows. The diameter of the rockets payload bay limits what can go into space, in the same way that many of the dimensions of buildings on Earth are defined by what can fit on the back of a lorry. And, while a terrestrial building site can have as many deliveries as it likes, space is a different matter: it would cost $500,000 (330,000) to send a single brick to the moon.

As a result, the challenge has always been to develop lightweight materials and kits, a kind of astro-Ikea approach, hopefully without the missing screw. But attention is now shifting towards inflatable structures, allowing entire habitats to be folded up and packed on board. Las Vegas-based aerospace company Bigelow, founded in 1998 by a budget hotel tycoon, now has an $18m contract with Nasa to install the first inflatable on the ISS this year.

It would cost $500,000 to send a single brick to the moon

It might look like a flimsy tinfoil balloon, but the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module is made of one of the most advanced fabrics ever developed: it boasts a layer of bulletproof Vectran, a liquid crystal polyarylate superfibre thats twice as strong as Kevlar and able to withstand micrometeoroids that would penetrate the aluminium shell of the ISS. The company has bigger modules in development and is also making plans for a space hotel though sadly not in the same price range as its Budget Suites of America.

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Let's all move to Mars! The space architects shaping our future