To The Moon To Stay

Web design

The Space Exploration Initiative at the MIT Media Lab describes itself as designing, prototyping, and building the artifacts of our sci-fi space future, and was founded, without irony, on the ethos of Starfleet Academy. For someone who grew up watching Star Trek and spent decades dreaming about exactly this kind of future, getting to design for them felt like a full-circle moment.

To the Moon to Stay began as a single website built to document and support a planned MIT lunar mission: three payloads aboard the Intuitive Machines IM-2 lander Athena, bound for the Mons Mouton region of the lunar south pole. The AstroAnt payload carried a miniature robotic swarm designed for surface scouting and temperature sensing. The camera payload was tasked with building a three-dimensional photographic map of the south pole region in preparation for future Artemis missions. And HUMANS, Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space, sent a nano-etched disc encoded with the voices of people from around the world, sharing their thoughts on what space means to humanity, MIT's answer to the golden record. The site functioned simultaneously as a public educational resource and a fundraising vehicle, with information about each payload and its sponsors. Lunar photography throughout is by Cosmic Background Photography.

A year later, as the launch date approached, it became clear in the middle of a meeting that no one had budget for a live mission site and no one had thought to build one. I volunteered to design it in two weeks. The live site launched with a countdown clock, embedded video lightboxes for five separate feeds including the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, the landing, and a dedicated MIT payloads stream, crew profiles, and a curated library of explanatory videos. The two sites form a continuous document of a mission from first announcement to landing.
On March 6, 2025, Athena touched down 250 meters from her intended site, landing on her side and unable to recharge her systems. Some data was transmitted before power ran out, and the HUMANS payload reached the lunar surface, which had always been its mission. We are already looking forward to the next one.

+ Moon Photographs: Courtesy Cosmic Background Photography
+ Website design and implementation: Olivia Verdugo
+ Special thanks to Dave Bonner for the assistance troubleshooting code!

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