For anyone planning a trip to the moon, MIT has just designed a pill-shaped inflatable moon tent that fills with oxygen and comfortably sleeps two. The portable habitat also protects moon explorers from the sun’s rays, contains food and water, and has a system that keeps potentially harmful moon dust out of the sleeping quarters. This futuristic tent, in its early stages, would allow astronauts to stray from the lunar lander and spend more time on the actual surface of the moon.
Such an overnight shelter could double the distance reachable from a permanent, as-yet-to-be-built moon base. This could, for instance, help explorers investigate a variety of sites at the 60-mile-wide Copernicus impact crater, one of the most prominent craters on the moon.
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