Cleveland Architects at Redhouse Studio Hope to Build Inflatable Housing for the Moon and Mars. Out of Mushrooms

Armando Cañas, head of construction at Redhouse Studio, holds up a brick of building material made from mushrooms. Credit: Mark Oprea

It costs roughly $10,000 to send a can of Coke into orbit. About $90,000 more if you want to drink it on the Moon. A million to pop it open on Mars.

That right there, you could say, is Christopher Maurer’s quintessential problem, and one of NASA’s several conundrums in its Artemis era: how to pack as light as possible, yet smart enough to still allow humans to live and work safely on other planets.

Maurer, the 44-year-old founder of Ohio City-based architecture firm Redhouse Studio, believes he and his team of three have a plausible solution, one that has received funding and support from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program since at least 2017, to one of the biggest questions: How to build housing.

Their answer: Not balsa-light wood. Or magical concrete. But shipping inflatable, dome-shaped huts that are insulated by self-sustaining material grown from mushrooms.

“It’s basically like grow-your-own-house,” Maurer said, walking around the hidden warehouse studio space of Mycohab, the Redhouse arm focused on mushroom research. From a pile, Maurer picked up a mahogany-colored brick that weighed as much as a bottle of wine. “You just add water.”

Mushrooms, as any fungi-attuned person can attest to, are having their moment. Chaga and Lion’s Mane species are battling coffee as a caffeine substitute. Magic mushroom therapy sessions are sprouting up across Oregon and Colorado. (And maybe Ohio some day.) Fungi is being used as a leather substitute, a Styrofoam alternative, even as a substrate for electronic wiring.

The inflatable hut, on Mars? Credit: Redhouse

And now, according to Redhouse and their cheerleaders at NASA, mushroom biomaterial—cutely nicknamed “mycocrete” by some—could be used to construct the dwellings and laboratories where members of the Artemis Mission study moon rock and hang their helmets. Sometime, Maurer predicts, “in the 2030s.”

Redhouse’s project, currently in its second phase, revolves around tenets of minimalism and speed. Maurer, along with partner Armando Cañas and Rolando Perez, who works at NASA Ames, experiments routinely with producing mycelium, fungal threads that full mushrooms grow from, at its most bare bones. That mycelium needs what’s called a bioreactor to grow full mushroom material, so Maurer’s team is lately experimenting with superlight packets of hydrogel—a pulverized seaweed that essentially grows that hut’s insulation from the inside out.

The upshot is that this stuff is almost indefinitely sustainable, or at least it wants to be. For proof, Maurer points to the three-and-a-half-square-mile Humongous Fungus growing in Malheur National Forest, Oregon, often considered one of the largest organisms on the planet.

“You can go with grams of that algae species. And then it would grow into a larger thing,” Maurer said, holding up a malleable container that looked like a blue ice cube tray. “From one cell, you could grow millions of tons, theoretically.

“Same with the mycelium,” he added. “From one spore, you can grow millions of tons, theoretically, because it just keeps. It’ll just grow.”

Although some studies have considered a mycocrete brick to be just as strong, and even stronger, than its concrete cousin, mushroom building material has its obvious setbacks. It has a huge buffer time—constructing a fully-finished hut, the kind that Redhouse wants to see occupied by NASA operators on the Moon, would take weeks to months before its fully inhabitable.

Christopher Maurer, Armando Cañas and Rolando Perez at Redhouse Studio’s Mycohab space on Cleveland’s West Side, on January 11, 2024. Credit: Mark Oprea

Rolando Perez setting up their inflatable prototype. Credit: Mark Oprea

And scientists and biomimicrists aren’t certain if the mycocrete that Maurer and team are experimenting with will actually behave like it does on earth. (It might not grow at all on Mars.) It’s why the Mycohab team plans on taking a prototype hut into the gargantuan vacuum chamber at the Glenn Research Center. And then, examine the impact of microgravity on the International Space Station. Then, the Moon itself.

That is, if the funding comes through. Maurer said that they would need at least $15 million to conduct a full-scale demonstration of the mushroom huts. For a thousand-ton fungi operation that would make it to outer space, the team said they’d need $150 million.

We’re bound to see Mycohab’s potential before then. After spending years researching sustainable housing across Africa, Maurer will be ribbon-cutting the world’s first mycelium building in Namibia in February.

“Everything we’re doing, I think, in my mind, has applications for Earth,” Rolando Perez, a 39-year-old bioengineer from California, told Scene. “And that’s one of my main motivations: spending resources, focus and time working on a project that’s for space. But technologies we might develop that could benefit Earth.”

As Perez operates a test inflation of their current prototype hut in an air-controlled space, Maurer and Cañas continue work for Redhouse in the quarters of their main studio, which is painted, one must say, a bright red fitting for Martians.

After aiding Perez, Cañas returned to his architect’s desk to review dozens of pages of plans for a non-mushroom structure. “It’s going to be a roastery in Bath, Ohio,” he said, flipping pages.

Maurer walked over to the table to observe. He laughed at the wild changing of gears. “Hey, we still do terrestrial work, too,” he said.