Home sweet — moon?

The year is 2040. You’re looking for a new home, and you want something a bit different. Maybe very different. Like that new subdivision on the moon.

Yes, the moon — the sunlit chunk of mostly silicon and magnesium orbiting Earth. Yes, I am serious. Or at least NASA is.

NASA has partnered with Austin-based ICON, a private manufacturer of 3D printers, to help create housing on the moon. The space printer’s robotic arm can be controlled from Earth so construction of the first building using raw moon materials can be done remotely. The first inhabitants will be astronauts and scientists who’ll work out how to live on the moon sustainably and efficiently.

Not to mention tolerably.

The moon is a hostile living environment. Lunar days and nights can last two weeks. It has a ridiculous amount of dust, generally toxic. Wild temperature swings (-414 to 253 degrees Fahrenheit), hurtling meteoroids and solar radiation mean stepping foot outside requires caution and a bulky suit.

Low gravity may be entertaining, but why would anyone other than scientists want to live in that?

For some of us, space is so cool and such a literally awe-some dream that any inconvenience is worth it. Plus, given increasingly urgent realities here on Earth, mankind needs practice to figure out how to live in space sooner than we may have imagined. As fast as we’re wearing out this planet, more experts are saying we’ll need to plan some kind of life in space while we find survival solutions. Or perhaps simply to satisfy our tendency to explore and expand.

NASA — in partnership with private industry and, to some extent, other nations’ space agencies — is getting ready. Remember the Apollo program of the 1960s and '70s? That landed people on the moon, but only briefly. Since then, no one has been back. Now NASA has begun the Artemis program (Apollo and Artemis were mythological siblings), its aim to return to the moon and stay a while.

Step one was a 2022 unmanned test flight launching Artemis’s new Orion spacecraft, jointly developed by NASA and the European Space Agency. Next up is a 2024 manned flyby. In 2025, if all goes as planned, NASA’s Artemis III astronauts will step foot on the moon once again (ESA astronauts will join NASA’s on joint missions before 2030).

Meanwhile, NASA is working with international and commercial partners on Gateway, an orbiting space station supporting an inhabitable moon base, and a potential staging point for deep space exploration. The vision is a complete system to support private residence as well, a sort of moon neighborhood by 2040.

All of this is only the beginning. The real goal, call it space living step two, is to do the same thing on Mars.

Beam me up, Scotty.

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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who wishes she’d been smart enough to study astrophysics. Email sholeh@cdapress.com.