NASA developing $3 million “pop up camper” for the Moon

If all goes well, NASA will send a group of explorers to the Moon as early as 2020, but they won't just touch and go. They'll stay awhile, and eventually others will follow to populate a moon base to serve as a staging area for flights to Mars.

But there's a little glitch: There are no Holiday Inns on the Moon. So NASA is developing something a bit more modest. A 20-foot-high, 12-foot-wide inflatable capsule that project manager Judith Watson describes as a "pop-up camper."

The capsule is made of layered nylon and designed to provide four people with 1,872 cubic feet of living and storage space.

On the moon, the habitat and an attached air-lock unit is connected by an airtight door would be pressurized to about the same as atop Colorado's Pikes Peak, 14,110 feet above sea level.

A prototype of the habitat is already in place at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, where it is being tested and tweaked.