500-Year Dome Home: Geoship Reveals First Home, Announces Goal Of 1 Million Units/Year

The 500-year ceramic geodesic dome home is vaporware no more. Geoship has unveiled the first full livable home in Nevada City, California exclusively to Forbes. The company is also announcing that Geoship has received over 10,000 preorders for its ceramic dome homes, and its new “Earthshot mission:” an ambitious goal to scale to 1 million units per year.

While the first dome is a smaller 18-foot diameter home, the goal is to be able to provide homes of all sizes.

“Our goal is to build big family domes,” says CEO Morgan Bierschenk “Two, three domes that connect together are anywhere from 1500 to 3000 square feet, and also the smaller … spaces, a lot of people want 400 square feet or 800 square feet.”

All those sizes, Bierschenk says, can be built and manufactured efficiently with domes of multiple sizes that interconnect.

Geoship first launched in early 2020 and unveiled an early prototype in mid-2020. The homes are designed to be mass produced in local factors, shipped to building sites, and assembled there by homeowners themselves or professional crews. Each geodesic dome is made of eco-friendly chemically bonded and natural ceramic materials, the company says, constructed via a unique injection-molding technique. They’re energy efficient, naturally insulating, don’t rot, don’t burn, and are resistant to earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, says Bierschenk.

They also have a 90% smaller carbon footprint than traditional homes, according to the company.

They’re also designed to be cost-effective.

“The base price for this 18-foot dome would be about $33,000,” Bierschenk says. “For a bigger kind 1,100 square foot dome it would be about $110,000.”

As manufacturing scales, Geoship’s goal is to reduce those prices by at least 50%, aiming to have homes “that are 2.5X median income in every location.”

All of that is a tall order. Tiny homes are big business right now, and many are trying to build them with found and recycled materials for $15,000 or $25,000. Geoship thinks they’ve got the materials science down pat, and plans to build multiple local factories to reduce shipping costs. But all of that is expensive, takes time, and has execution risk, which Bierschenk acknowledges.

“We’re really focused first on building the best home over the next couple of years,” he says. “We’re really designing for manufacturing and then the challenge after we have the best home is to be able to produce it, to make it the most affordable home.”

A comparable, for him, is Tesla, which first built expensive cars and then offered (somewhat) cheaper ones.

“I think Tesla Motors is a kind of a good benchmark for this kind of thing because this is a really deep innovation in terms of new material science, new product design, new factory design,” he says. “It took Tesla Motors six years to deliver the hundredth car, and then 14 years to get to a million cars a year. And I think we’re somewhere around that same trajectory.”

The execution risk largely centers on scaling production. One challenge: there aren’t broadly available injection molding factories, Bierschenk says, so Geoship has to develop that technology itself.

And the company doesn’t have the benefit of an Elon Musk emerald mine or PayPal fortune to pay for it.

But it’s not just a job for Bierschenk: it’s a mission.

“We’re really trying to introduce a new archetype of home … with the climate crisis combined with the housing affordability crisis and kind of the crisis of disconnection, for lack of a better way to describe that,” he says.

The material is new and space-age — developed by the US National Labs by the nuclear industry — but it’s widely used in applications as diverse as bridge repair and inside the human body for bone strengthening. And Bierschenk can wax a little new age as he shares the experience of living in this kind of dome home.

“We’ve been working on this project for a long time, and it’s just in the last few days we got it complete enough where I could just be able to sit in here and really experience the space,” he says. “And it’s phenomenal … it really feels like you’re being held by the earth in a sense. Like earthing is the combination of earthen floors, high dielectric ceramic materials, and these kind of great circle skylights that kind of make you feel connected to the outside, yet really held.”

The floors in the first Geoship dome home are in fact cob floors, but can be covered by ceramic or pretty much any other material owners desire.

As with every other innovation, the devil is in the details.

This first Geoship dome home is real, actual, and built, with power and internet connectivity. But building homes for the vast majority of people will require more plumbing, more space — both private and public — and significantly more money.

The 10,000 preorders will help, but to scale to 1 million deliveries per year is a massive challenge.

Bierschenk is all in.

“We joked that we burned the boats,” he says. “We literally did: I sold my wood sailboat that I lived on to start bootstrapping Geoship.”