Our objective is to provide students practical experience in "space analogue missions", by creating a portable habitat which can be installed in various locations, providing opportunities for analogue missions. This will nurture hands-on experience which students will require in their future careers, through the involvement of interdisciplinary collaboration, promoting technology, science, engineering and the arts. The greater goal for UKAM is to ignite the passion for space exploration in the British public, and elevate our role in the international cooperation of human spaceflight.

UKAM aims to utilise the variety of landscapes within the UK to simulate isolated manned space flight missions. We are working closely with international partners in collaborating future mission designs and locations to provide the closest experience possible to the space environment. The habitat has been designed by the incredible architects at D-Mars who join us in selecting dedicated students to build the UKAM habitat. The habitat is portable, designed to leave without a trace, making it ideal to navigate through the array of selected locations, easy to transport and store.

An analogue space mission, or ‘analogue’, is a situation, environment or event on Earth that replicates the conditions of outer-space, or another celestial body. These can be used to test the performance of new technologies destined for other planets, or put the human body through similar effects as living and working off-world, helping us learn, practice and prepare for the future. Existing analogue missions have sent crews to live in hostile environments such as deserts for several weeks, in some cases months, under the same physical, organisational, and technological restrictions that future astronauts will face.