Designing for a Visible Earth: Human-Centered Window Strategies for Lunar Surface Habitats

As plans for sustained human presence on the Moon accelerate, visual access to Earth emerges as both a psychological anchor and a design challenge in lunar habitat architecture. Yet, while window-view evaluation is well established in terrestrial architecture, it has not been adapted to the distinct visibility geometry and altered viewing conditions of the lunar environment. This study develops a transferable framework that integrates lunar Earth-visibility constraints with architectural view analysis to evaluate Earth-view quality in lunar surface habitats. Earth visibility across the lunar near side is first characterized to derive site-specific azimuth and elevation conditions for observation. Building on this geometric foundation, a parametric habitat model is constructed to generate dense interior viewpoints within a standardized lunar configuration. View quality is assessed using a solid-angle-based metric that integrates horizontal and vertical fields of view, and statistical distributions are analyzed under varying window-to-wall ratios and window partitioning strategies. Results identify a stable Earth-view corridor at mid-to-low latitudes and reveal clear trade-offs between window scale, window number, immersive view probability, and spatial coverage. By explicitly linking orbital constraints to human-scale visual experience, the proposed workflow reframes window design as a measurable contributor to lunar habitability and supports evidence-based decision-making for future surface settlements.