On 2 May 2069, UNOLA formally declared its three-campus research expansion complete — a decade after the sites were first approved in 2059. The campuses are now administratively designated Dome 1, Dome 2, and Dome 3.
The Crater Method
All three domes were built using a construction approach UNOLA chief construction engineer Ingrid Halvorsen called “the single largest cost saving in the Office’s engineering history, and the single largest reason none of us should have promised anyone a fast timeline.” Rather than excavating new interior volume — the Silo approach at Zvezda and Pobeda — each dome site was selected for a pre-existing impact crater. Crews erected internal scaffolding and deck structures directly into the crater bowl, using its natural slope to stack multiple working levels around a central shaft, then capped the structure with a geodesic truss dome and buried the entire assembly under several metres of regolith.
“We are not building domes,” Halvorsen told reporters. “We are building a floor plan inside a hole nature already dug for us, and then hiding the whole thing under a hill. The ‘dome’ is just the part of the building you’re not supposed to be able to see.”
The Three Domes
Dome 1 (far-side Tsiolkovsky consortium): energy security and engineering campus — independent fusion-adjacent power grid for the radio-quiet array, fabrication and materials-testing workshops.
Dome 2 (Peary Station): life support and biological systems campus — closed-loop agriculture, soil analogue cultivation, biological monitoring. Agricultural yield now exceeds local consumption, with surplus shipments to Guanghan since 2068. Habitat-design guidance is informally requested even by sites outside UNOLA’s jurisdiction, including Zvezda.
Dome 3 (Mare Frigoris): computing and cognitive systems campus. At completion, Dome 3 is the largest single research structure on the lunar surface by enclosed volume, surpassing even Kosmograd’s habitat ring. It houses UNOLA’s largest quantum co-processing installation, developed jointly with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Hefei programme, and continues to host the research initiative that drew international attention following the 2059 Xiangdao leak. Unlike Domes 1 and 2, Dome 3 operates under a tiered access and disclosure regime not extended to any other UNOLA facility.
Secretary-General Ishikawa — successor to Amara Diallo-Sørensen — addressed the disparity directly: “Two of these domes exist to make life on the Moon easier to sustain, and I can describe plainly what each one does. The third is the largest structure we have ever built up here, it cost more than the other two combined, and I will not pretend to you that I understand everything happening inside it. I have been told that is by design. I am not certain that should be as reassuring as it is meant to be.”
Combined resident population across the three domes: 340. Dome 3, despite its size, remains the least populated by working staff.