House paint
35 billion litres
≈ 45 million tonnes, roughly a year of Earth's entire paint industry.
≈ 450,000 heavy lunar landings
faceyspacies.com
Imagine if we could
put a face in space.
One smile. Painted on the Moon. Visible to every person on Earth who ever looks up.
Scroll to see how
Chapter 1 · The canvas
The biggest wall
anyone could paint on.
The Moon is 384,400 km away and 3,474 km wide. It's tidally locked, so the same face always points at us. Whatever we paint there stays turned toward Earth, forever.
Chapter 2 · The eye test
Your eye sees in pixels
about 112 km wide.
A healthy human eye resolves roughly 1 arcminute. At the Moon's distance, that works out to a patch about 112 km across.
That gives the Moon about 31 "pixels" across, seen with no telescope. Our face has to read clearly at that resolution.
Chapter 3 · The design
Two eyes. One smile.
Nothing else needed.
- Eyes250 km wide each, about 2 pixels, so they read as dots
- Smile1,676 km long, 150 km thick, a 120° arc
- OutlineFree. The Moon is already round.
Chapter 4 · The surface area
About the size of Germany.
349,500km² to cover
Eyes: 98,000 km². Smile: 251,000 km². That's roughly 350 billion square metres, a little bigger than Germany and a little smaller than Japan.
Chapter 5 · The paint
How much paint is that?
Ordinary white paint covers about 10 m² per litre. Bright white (albedo ~0.8) on dark lunar mare (albedo ~0.07) is over 10× brighter than the ground around it, brighter than any crater ray on the Moon.
Reflective film
1 million tonnes
A 2-micron aluminised film unrolled by rovers. 45× lighter than paint.
≈ 10,000 heavy lunar landings
Moon-made white
0 tonnes shipped
Robots crush bright highland anorthosite and spread it over dark mare. The paint is already up there.
Our favourite. A fleet, not a fleet of rockets.
Chapter 6 · Your turn
Design your own smile.
- Area
- 349,500 km²
- Paint
- 35.0 billion L
- Mass
- 45.4 million t
- Landings*
- 454,000
*At 100 tonnes of cargo per landing. Features thinner than 112 km start to blur for the naked eye.
Chapter 7 · The mission
The goal: make the whole world smile back.
- Dream it. Gather the faceyspacies: dreamers, engineers, artists, and anyone who looks up.
- Prove it. Test brightening techniques on regolith simulant here on Earth.
- Pixel one. Brighten a single 112 km patch you could spot with your own eyes.
- Two eyes. The first night the Moon looks back at us.
- The smile. 1,676 km of it. Every human, every night, for as long as anyone looks up.
Look up tonight.
Imagine it smiling.
Big ideas start as silly ones. This one is about 350,000 km² of silly.