The MoonArk is both conceptual art and a time capsule. Almost 15 years ago, the idea was to create a time capsule carrying fragments of the world as we know it today and send it to the moon to be discovered in the distant future. Today, the project has 60 members from 18 institutions and over 250 contributing designers, scientists, poets, musicians etc. Mark Baskinger, one of the first to get involved with the project, shares what it was like at the

beginning. ''The MoonArk was a conceptual idea concocted by a few pioneering faculty members here, namely, Red Whitaker in the Robotics Institute and Lowry Burgess, former Dean of the College of Fine Arts. And their thought was that if Carnegie Mellon were to go to the moon, it can't just be the sciences and the technologies and that side of campus represented and that the arts would surely have something to contribute.''

Working on MoonArk was creative and exciting but challenging. As our guests say, creating an object like the MoonArk goes beyond making it look nice. It has to be safe and resilient to different conditions. ''We wanted it to be beautiful and aesthetic. So we went about making it with no real knowledge of what it was going to take to get it there. So, when it was time to put the rubber on the road, we were like, 'Oh, my goodness. It has to go through all this different, rigorous testing,''' says Dylan.

Many components are handmade. What makes the MoonArk astonishing is the amount of work, especially manual work, that’s been put into its creation. ''[...], a sculptor metal worker made quite a contribution to this project. It was amazing to visit and watch him do this under the monitor, zoomed in significantly — getting to see the intricacy of the work that was a part of it. But the biggest issue was whether those micro welds would be strong and consistent enough to be able to sustain the rigorous trip that the MoonArk was going to go through,'' explains Matt.

''The MoonArk began around late 2008 or early 2009 as a conceptual project that would join Carnegie Mellon's first attempt at building a lunar lander to go to the moon at that time, 2012. It was originally seeded by the Google Lunar X Prize.

We were one of the competing teams that, over the years, did rather well with seed funding and enough support, and CMU was able to spin out a new company called Astrobotic, a private space-faring agency located in Pittsburgh.

And so, Astrobotic became the carrier and the designer of a lunar lander that would take commercial, academic, and all sorts of private payloads to the moon. Its main mission was to create this ferrying operation to move between the surface of the Earth and the surface of the moon on a consistent basis,'' Mark explains.

''It was incredibly tricky and paralyzing at times. And we realized early on that things were going to be left off, and we just couldn't be accountable for everything.

The analogy we often use is of moving through a city and the idea that you might hear different languages or poetry [and there’d be different] smells. So, moving through a complicated space and making it a sensorial experience of what it's like to be on Earth now.

So the MoonArk is essentially four different, fairly small chambers. So we have a total of nine ounces that's divided over four different chambers. The size is a little smaller than half of a Coke can. And the four chambers speak about the complexity of being a human now.''

''There were certain processes that this object would go through on the trip to the moon and due to the conditions on the moon. And we had to make sure that this object was prepared for that. We're hitching a ride to the moon; the equipment that's being used for this particular flight — we had to make sure that none of our components would damage any of their equipment. [...]

The bakeout became very crucial for us. The various samples underwent a vacuum test as well as the temperature test through the vacuum oven. And it helped to confirm that what we had was going to be properly prepared and that there wouldn't be any issues along the way. And so it was a very crucial part of the process — in addition to a lot of other tests that we had to go through.''