Mirroring the interdisciplinary nature of space colonization projects where architects, roboticists, and space scientists work together to achieve common goals, this new interfaculty graduation course, Lunar Architecture and Infrastructure (LA&I), is designed to foster collaboration among students from various faculties. It has been developed at TU Delft and is now open to all Leiden-Delft-Erasmus (LDE) Space students interested in addressing challenges of space colonization with particular focus on robotic construction and operation while heavily relying on In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) and discrete automation.
So far TU Delft has advanced various themes aligned with the LA&I goals at the faculties of Architecture and the Built Environment and Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Industrial Design and Engineering. With Leiden and Erasmus Rotterdam Universities joining the exploration, LA&I expands towards incorporating themes ranging from astronomy, law, management, and economics, to biology, biomedical sciences, psychology, social and behavioral sciences. With this a holistic approach to living and working in space can be achieved by transferring technologies from terrestrial to extraterrestrial applications and vice versa.