The Moonhouse – Sending an artwork to space
Project name:
The Moonhouse
Client name:
Moonhouse AB
Duration:
2023–2025
Vinterstellar Deliverables:
- Mission engineering & systems integration support
- Hold-Down and Release Mechanism (HDRM) design and analysis
- Drop-stability testing and simulation
- Illumination studies for lunar surface photography
- Analogue testing at ESA-DLR LUNA facility (EAC, Cologne)
The Moonhouse is a small, Falun-red aluminum “cottage” – a miniature version of the iconic Swedish country house – conceived by artist Mikael Genberg as the first work of art to be placed on the Moon. Launched in January 2025 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, it traveled to the Moon as a cultural payload on ispace’s Resilience lunar lander and Tenacious micro-rover, covering over 1 million km before entering lunar orbit in May 2025. The mission demonstrated that small, culturally meaningful payloads can be engineered to meet the tight mass, volume, and operational constraints of commercial lunar missions.
Vinterstellar joined the Moonhouse project as a technical partner, contributing to the engineering that turned an artistic vision into a flight-qualified lunar payload. Our work spanned the design and analysis of the holding and release mechanism, drop-stability testing (including vacuum chamber tests), and illumination studies to optimize photography conditions on the lunar surface. We also supported analogue testing at the ESA-DLR LUNA facility in Cologne, where rover deployment and imaging operations were rehearsed in a simulated Moon environment.