Moon Bound Payload Integration

What does it take to send a book and an art collection to the Moon?

On April 24th, 2025, the Moon Bound Book alongside other artworks and seeds was integrated into a pyramid-shaped container, created by LifeShip, a company devoted to sending terrestrial materials to space. The assembly of the pyramid was conducted by Ben Haldeman, the founder and CEO of LifeShip.

The shape of the container itself is ancient — one of the oldest architectural solutions humans ever created. Reflecting on the integration, Ben noted: “Pyramids have passed the test of time in human history. All different cultures and great civilizations have built pyramids, as it is the optimal structure for building something tall and strong. What the pyramid symbolises for us is a representation of previous civilizations — something meant to last for many thousands of years, and to become a message and a gift from our civilization to future explorers and discoverers.”

The loading process was meticulous. Because of the pyramid’s triangular form, Ben had to hold it upside down and load it with careful precision. What is loaded at the bottom will ultimately sit at the top. Over 20 artworks, around 100 plant seeds and 10 different art plates had to fit within a slightly more than a two-centimeter pyramid, with every piece having an assigned position and planned well in advance. At the heart of the pyramid is the Moon Bound Book itself: the biggest volume within the payload space. Alongside it, a collection of microsculptures physically occupies most of the space inside.

It was a one-time opportunity that felt like a surgical procedure. All payload pieces were coated in epoxy to protect them from the friction of launch, preserving every little detail across the collection’s varied materiality and texture. Assembling all these artworks with epoxy in between required full focus and a high level of precision, as there was only once chance to make sure that every puzzle piece fell into its rightful place. The Moon Bound Book required its own protective solution: kapton tape, applied to shield its pages and prints from the epoxy surrounding it.

The integration process was a defining moment — and the space that held it was chosen with intention. It was performed inside a geodesic dome at LifeShip headquarters: not a conventional office, but an intentional community set across ten acres of land, surrounded by nature preserve. Located near an avocado plantation, it gave a sense of absolute isolation from the big city, filled with the chorus of frogs and fragrance of a wild meadow.

“We assembled it here, in a dome,” Ben explains, “because a dome might be how we will live on the Moon someday. It is an optimal structure, requiring the least materials for the most volume. It has the smallest surface area, so it absorbs the least heat and is the easiest to thermally regulate. Domes make a lot of sense for future living — both in space and on Earth. It feels beautiful to put together a seedbank and a monument to Earth and human creativity in nature, on land and in a community.”

Anna Sitnikova, a co-founder of the Moon Gallery and a mission coordinator, had arrived there a week before the integration was due to begin — and that week was a time filled with uncertainty and anticipation. She made a habit of checking the post office a few times a day, waiting for the precious pieces to arrive, while the integration date had been pushed as late as possible to accommodate any postal delays. In that time, Anna became part of the community’s life, feeling warmly welcomed: joining communal dinners and meetings, preparing the dome all together, searching for the best available tables and equipment. The community’s shared resources turned out to be unexpectedly useful — a theatre on the premises, for instance, supplied the lamps that would illuminate the work. It was a matter of talking to people, finding what was available, and making it work.

The integration also drew other artists into the process. Eduardo Kac, a visionary artist whose contribution is in the Moon Bound Book, came on board the night before the integration. He helped document the process and offered his support along the way. Jack Madden travelled from Los Angeles to deliver his art piece that had to be integrated into the pyramid, in person, joining the community dinner. The Moon Bound had always been a collective act — and meeting the artists made that feel real.

Once the pyramid was sealed, a different kind of tension took hold. The epoxy, now encased in a closed container, had to cure — and there was no way of knowing, for sure, that it would. If it didn’t, the payload would be rejected. About a week later, the pyramid passed a test of gently pressing and squeezing to probe for any not solidified masses inside, and after successful testing, it became quite clear that it had dried up. With it, finally, came relief, so the team was ready for the next step — heading to the AstroLab office.

On April 30th, 2025, Anna, Ben and his daughter Luna arrived in Los Angeles. They were excited, as their interactions and communication with AstroLab had been effective and genuinely pleasant from the start, and they were eager to meet the project partners in person. Anna first met the company’s representatives in October at the International Astronautical Congress 2024 in Italy, who were displaying FLIP and FLEX rovers alongside hyper-deformable wheels by Venturi Space. Among them was Kelly Randell, a payload specialist, who became the main point of contact for the mission ever since, which made it all the more surprising to walk into the LA office and find her there once again. The world suddenly felt small. The office itself was open-space and modern. Anna, Ben and Luna were warmly greeted by the team, tried a VR experience of driving on the moon, that was installed aboard a show model of the FLEX rover, and delivered the payload. It was a cheerful and memorable moment for them handing over the case with the pyramid and shaking hands with the partners.

“Having the seeds of our plants, the DNA of animals, and art from our culture inside — this is a gift to future civilizations,” Ben shared, “and by placing it on the Moon, where there is no weather, no rain, no wind, it will outlast the pyramids here on Earth. It can last for thousands, millions of years — some materials even longer, for billions of years. It could be a gift to the far, far future. I see it as a beautiful and optimistic mission for humanity: preserving monuments and messages, along with seeds for the time to come. I am optimistic about our future as a species. The stories, the art, the creativity of Earth — all of it will be carried across the galaxy.”

“At that moment, I felt very honoured to be able to take part in this handover moment — an important milestone on our journey towards the Moon,” Anna shares, “There were so many variables, so many points at which things could have gone differently, that being there was quintessential — it was a moment of gratitude to the team and artists involved, to all the people who made it possible and worked so hard on this project.

This experience gave me a chance to look at Moon Gallery’s mission from a broader perspective, and reflect on the work of the foundation. It made me think: this is not impossible — it is achievable indeed. This is no longer the realm of dreams. We can do a Moon mission, and we know exactly how. As the next step, we see Moon Gallery creating a site-specific installation curated for and exposed to the lunar environment. We want to develop a process that embraces co-creation and collaboration, provides enough time to develop the mission in the most nuanced way, enables time for reflection, and brings everything to its full potential”.

The art collection includes: FENUA: The Last Fragment by Paulina Almeida, Lunar Sample Return 1 (LSR-1) by Jack Madden, Flight Candidate #9 by Hans Brooymans, Time Slices by Lakshmi Mohanbabu, Oceans Deep: Blue Marble by Richelle Ellis, Unfinished (Hope) by Masahito Ono, Copper Wire Nest by Mary Kuiper, Beauty in Scale by Jessica Hunnicutt, Earthling–Conduit of Emotions by Eva Petrič, “Moon Village”: A Global Science Opera by Oded Ben-Horin, Kjetil Sømoe, and Janne Robberstad.