Guided by the lunar and Mars Design Reference Missions developed by Dr. Jim Head, Commander Dave Scott, and colleagues, ARK confronts the central constraint of interplanetary settlement: every kilogram launched off Earth costs a fortune, and a finished habitat shipped across the solar system would run into the trillions. Biology rewrites that equation. Instead of launching walls and tanks and greenhouses, ARK sends spores and seeds — featherweight payloads that arrive dormant and grow their own structure, atmosphere, water, and food using the regolith and sunlight already waiting at the destination.
ARK is redhouse studio's vision for expanding human life beyond Earth by bringing the full biosphere with us. Developed through NASA's NIAC Phase III program with Principal Investigator Dr. Lynn Rothschild, ARK proposes habitats on the Moon and Mars that enlist every kingdom of life — bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants, and animals — as collaborators in construction, life support, and nourishment. These are not buildings in the conventional sense, but living systems designed to take root on another world.
What arrives in a vial, unfolds into a world. Each ARK habitat condenses roughly three billion years of evolutionary problem-solving — photosynthesis, mycelial networks, nitrogen fixation, digestion, immunity — into a single living structure. It is an ark in the fullest sense: carrying the accumulated intelligence of Earth's biosphere outward and giving it new ground to thrive on, so that the next chapter of life is not written by humans alone, but by the whole community of organisms that made us possible.
A habitat is only as alive as the meals shared inside it. ARK treats food not as rationed cargo but as the daily expression of a working biosphere — greens, grains, ferments, and proteins produced by the same community of organisms that builds and sustains the structure around them. Sitting down to eat on Mars becomes something more than sustenance: it is the moment when crew, microbes, plants, and place become a single living system, and when the long journey from Earth finally tastes like home.