Inside a Precisely Designed Lunar Lander Replica House

Those are QR codes for the two websites

for the Spaceship Project.

So when I'm not here and people come by and go,

what the hell is that, then they can just

walk up with their phone and get the answer.

[upbeat music]

Welcome to the Lunar Lander Dwelling House.

We're in Beverly, Washington,

on the Columbia River in the Columbia Basin,

it's a desert part of Washington state.

My lunar lander's a replica of the Apollo lunar lander

that went to the moon in the late 60s, early 70s.

One of the connections was the astronauts

trained some 50 miles downstream.

I decided to build this lunar lander

because I've been building things pretty much all my life.

When I was 21 or 22 I built a dome.

When I was in college I built my first sailboat.

When tiny homes started becoming a thing

I noticed that they had several problems.

They were heavy, they were structurally weak.

I'm a catamaran designer and I thought

the same technologies could apply

to make a better tiny house.

The first thing I did was to do a 3D model,

then I could pull off patterns.

And from those patterns I cut pieces out,

vacuum bagged them together, brought them over here,

and then used epoxy to glue them all together.

I'm Kurt Hughes, this is my proof of concept prototype

of a tiny house built like a catamaran.

When people first come in here

they see Captain Nemo's window,

just like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The idea was to have it an open environment.

It's nice to be able to come in,

look out the window, watch the river.

And then right below it is the table from my first sailboat

that got repurposed here.

The lights are controlled by buttons, like on this one here.

Then I can sit down on the comfortable epoxy foam seats.

These holes in the chairs save weight,

it's kind of an aerospace thing.

And that's sort of a philosophical statement

of the whole building.

You'll notice there's a lot of NASA here,

NASA's a good model for efficient spacecraft.

Antigravity pads overhead, in case the gravity disappears.

Off to the left there is the weather center

so we can see what's actually happening outside there.

And then here might be the only set of stamped

engineered plans of a lunar lander house that there is.

Here's one sheet for example, with the elevations,

and those are pulled off of the 3D model.

This is what I would do to a boat design.

[jazzy music]

Okay, the next thing would be the sink,

which is actually like a telescope mirror.

It picks up the lights in the sunlight here

and focuses it to a certain place right there,

which is something I never expected.

A nice surprise.

These are plumbing fixtures that

I've converted to light controls.

Here's the bathroom.

It's a Japanese Toto Wahan toilet

that I wanted to see the mechanisms for,

so I bolted it right to the wall.

And it ends up with a tank that's only three inches deep,

which in a tiny house saves a lot of space.

Over there is the toilet paper holder.

On the floor is a glow in the dark powder

so that at night the entire floor is glowing

like the Milky Way, so you can see where you're going.

And the shower has different light colors

for the temperature of the water.

So when the water is cold it's blue,

as it warms up it's green,

and when you get to 45 degrees Celsius it's red.

There's my compact boat bathroom on a house.

[dynamic music]

Okay, next we look at the front door.

The door opens with fingertip biometrics.

And then it's interesting, look how thick it is.

It insulates, R-15, most doors are R-2 or R-3.

So it's got a huge amount more insulation.

But then that required a recessed door handle.

So that added another week of construction time right there.

But it had to be just right.

[jazzy music]

Okay, this is the kitchen,

or galley as we call in on a boat.

And one of the interesting things

is my carbon fiber countertop.

Range hood, makes it legal with the code.

Here's the sink, microwave,

refrigerator, drawers for storage.

Here's a 3D model of the lunar lander

that my daughter created for me.

And it's the same 3D model that I used to build the plans.

Most important thing that the boat design

does to help the kitchen is the moisture control.

This is all epoxy.

And so you don't need a backsplash

because the epoxy does it anyway.

[upbeat music]

Up overhead is the dome that lets the light in.

And that way at night I can sit here and look at the stars

when the lights are off.

It's all steel with plexiglass panels.

It was a final element study to have

more than enough strength for any snow load.

The lighting going around the upper part

of the ceiling there,

so I wanted to be able to change the colors.

But also they're all wrapped with three quarter ounce

spinnaker cloth from a sailboat.

And so it has a Japanese lantern feel.

Now the original lunar lander didn't have a deck.

I wanted to have a way to be able to see

this beautiful scenery.

So you sit out here in the evening, couple chairs,

have a drink, look at the river, it's great.

So originally this was gonna be a lounging pit,

but the building department declared

it had to have seven foot headroom

so it got a lot deeper, and then that became the bedroom.

Okay, let's go down and have a look at the downstairs.

So we're downstairs now.

This is the bed, this is the ship's ladder

that we just came down on.

The floor is all Ethafoam like a wrestling mat,

so that you can fall comfortably if you fall.

Six of the closets here.

And then there's some lights here.

So right down there is a planetarium

and it projects up on the ceiling.

I feel like I'm traveling through space

when I have the planetarium on and I'm looking at it.

I wanted to use boat windows downstairs.

The problem was the building department

wouldn't allow it unless I took out

the plastic standard boat windows

and replaced them with double-pane

argon filled e-coating widows.

And now we'll go take a look at the outside.

[jazzy music]

Here we're in the outside of the lunar lander dwelling.

It's got some unusual features.

It's not on the ground, it's off the ground.

There's concrete pads at the end of each of the steel legs.

A neighbor across the street happened to have

a plasma cutter and he cut out my railings.

How cool is that?

And he cut out the stair stringers.

These structural legs are actually an improvement over

the original lunar lander, they had four legs,

which is a unstable configuration.

This has three, which is much more stable.

You'll notice there's a hold down cables

like we do rigging on a sailboat.

And that's what's important to keep

a very light structure weighing about

just over a ton, keep it in one place.

There's glow pebbles on the walkway

so you can see where you're walking at night.

And then there's solar powered footlights

that light up the steps all night long.

So these are storage bins for outside storage

and inside storage on the inside.

There's never enough storage in a tiny house,

so I wanted to make sure we had a lot of it.

[upbeat music]

This has become my favorite place in the world.

It's fun, it's interesting, and it keeps me thinking.

It's just a beautiful place to get away to.