If it does succeed in making its way to the lunar surface, Vitae would not be the first art on the moon. It has never been confirmed by NASA, but Moon Museum is a small ceramic wafer measuring 19 millimetres by 12 millimetres and bearing drawings by 1960s artists Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, David Novros, Forrest Myers, Robert Rauschenberg and John Chamberlain. Warhol drew his initials, which also look like a penis or a space rocket. Supposedly, the creation was secretly attached to a leg of the Intrepid landing module and left on the moon during Apollo 12 in November 1969. Then, in August 1971, Commander David Scott of Apollo 15 placed Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonck’s 89-millimetre-tall aluminum sculpture Fallen Astronaut in a small crater near his lunar rover. It’s a miniature representation of an astronaut in a space suit and lies near a plaque carrying the names of 14 astronauts who had died. NASA does recognize that work’s presence on the moon.

As for Banon’s piece, “The hard work has been melding the engineering with the art,” says Shaun Whitehead, a British aerospace engineer and Vitae’s technical director. “Something we’re not normally limited by in engineering is the requirement to make it a beautiful sculpture.” During daylight on the moon, the sculpture will look like a cocoon, enclosing one kilogram of shape-memory alloy as the lunar soil beneath captures solar energy. At night it blossoms, as a dish-shaped base unfolds and reveals what Banon calls the “T pole,” which resembles a tree and represents, as she sees it, “a lot of different people all in different directions but all united at the base.” The two tallest people hold a 10-watt laser, which will pulse a few times each night and be visible from Earth with a pair of binoculars.

Whitehead says the bottom dish will act as a “thermal radiation shield” at night. It will reduce the rate at which the heat leaks away from the rocky lunar material beneath it, in the same way a survival blanket prevents body heat from radiating away. The solar energy that is stored by the soil during the day will be the sculpture’s power source, allowing it to open during the night, much as earthly moonflowers do, Whitehead points out.

Banon has been working on Vitae for more than five years. In 2012, a model of Vitae achieved its first flight to the edge of space attached to a weather balloon. This month, the project will be entering phase three: deployment on board the International Space Station (ISS) in order to test its materials and properties in microgravity. Nanoracks is a private U.S. company that provides research space aboard the ISS and has been working alongside the Vitae team for more than three years. “Getting something from concept on the ground actually to the International Space Station is very complex,” says Mary Murphy, an internal payloads manager with Nanoracks. “Essentially you’re taking something and putting it up on a rocket, which has inherent risks, and then you’re putting it into an environment that’s basically the equivalent of a five-bedroom house inhabited by roughly six people.”