Deep Space Habitat Hearing
Space Subcommittee Hearing – Next Steps to Mars: Deep Space Habitats
“On Wednesday, May 18, 2016 at 2:00 p.m. in Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Subcommittee on Space will hold a hearing titled, “Next Steps to Mars: Deep Space Habitats.” The hearing will examine Mars exploration, specifically efforts to develop deep space habitation capabilities.”
– Statement, Jason Crusan, NASA
– Statement, John Elbon, Boeing
– Statement, Wanda Sigur, Lockheed Martin
–Statement, Frank Culbertson, Orbital ATK
–Statement, Andy Weir, Author, The Martian
Ironic not to include Space X or Bigelow in this
Yes, some days I get the unsettling sense some people at JSC are bucking for a sole-source, or at least a cost-plus (or as close as they can get away with) to Lockheed or Boeing for a hab based on Orion and/or ISS technology. The Bigelow work being funded merely as a ruse, to make NASA look innovative and open to new ideas here.
It’s just the usual suspects engaged in their usual suspicious activities. But it does make for a pretty picture.
But they have Andy Weir!
NASA’s innovation aversion is borderline pathological in this matter. They won’t consider inflatables; the only reason that OSC-ATK is even on the radar is because their pressurised modules are built by the same people who built the ISS US-segment modules.
Because people aren’t there doesn’t mean they weren’t invited.
Looks to me like the entire approach is backwards. First they have an Orion, and so now they need a deep space hab because they really cannot do anything with Orion without a deep space hab. But in reality, the deep space hab is much more closely related to the ISS and its systems, and it would have made much more sense to base a deep space hab on ISS components and systems as the next step after ISS, rather than some longer term downstream step. Orion is redundant with the Dragon and CST, So at this point and after more than 5 years that NASA has simply been wasting a lot of NASA dollars-very unnecessary. But we really knew that a decade ago. Orion could not replace Shuttle. Orion could do nothing without a lot of other major pieces. So why it ever made sense to proceed with Orion as the first piece, made little sense, and it made a lot less sense once Commercial Cargo and Crew was engaged, five years ago. Maybe the real purpose of this session is to get things lined up for the next Administration and the expectation that Orion will soon be cancelled and then NASA will be wondering what to do next?
Yes. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I don’t feel like giving the speech about traceability matrices and how worthless they are when written from the right to the left. But the sort of backward approach you describe is actually quite common.
Orion is not redundant with the Dragon and CST. (a) Rad hardened components throughout owing to deep space requirements; (b) heavy radiation shielding/shelter (ditto); (c) auto return capability (5 modes), (d) built to accommodate exercise regimens (layout, life support, etc); (e) network – rad hardened deterministic gigabit ethernet….etc….
Looking at the art work this isn’t a ‘habitat’ anymore than Carlsbad Caverns are habitats. These guys need some real planners or architects to help them actually build something other than a noisy, messy and (probably) smelly thing in space– seriously the only thing the ISS or that ‘hab’ have that’s any different from locking someone in a room on earth is micro-gravity (ok, and a bit of radiation).
You wanna actually *live* in space? Get some folks who understand something about the design of living spaces. Relegate the engineers to the second tier of design. It’s how successful communities are built down here– developers learned that lesson decades ago– and it’s the way we will build places in space that folks will actually want to inhabit.
Actually there are a couple of us left who did do this design job for ISS, and for other spacecraft too. There used to be a NASA organization that specialized in this, but about 15 years ago they lost their way under the scientists and decided they would only do “research”. There wasn’t much left to design by the late 90s anyway. So the organization that designed the interior of Mir, and ISS, and Shuttle, and the interior of every other US manned spacecraft before no longer exists. NASA human space flight lost its way. Now they are wondering, how did we used to do this?
Whenever I comment on this board I’m mindful that there are smarter people than I reading, people often actually involved in a project rather than commenting as a self-made expert. Or folks that would lose jobs if the favored policy actually happened.
Truthfully I don’t know how ISS became such an unpleasant monster. I’d assumed that somewhere, someplace there are NASA people qualified to design human spaces, but it’s not clear from the result that they had much input.
If ISS is supposed to be a ‘space outpost’ where we learn to live in space, it fails, just as it has failed as a place to do science.
Down here on the ground land developers for decades built grid-based ‘communities’. The infrastructure in these communities is very expensive to build and maintain, but more to the point there are no opportunities for open spaces or recreation facilities.
Enter land planners, who showed developers they could have the same yield, much lower environmental impact, and higher profits while actually creating places that people begged to inhabit- they stand in line often for new communities. Sure the engineers have a part, but is is decidedly not design. (and this part shouldn’t be understated either).
It’s model that can work in space. For habitats, on Mars, Luna, anywhere.
Follow the money.
NASA could use more industrial designers.
I take genuine exception, since I was one of those people responsible for the ISS habitat and module design. And we had our fair share of industrial designers and human factors experts, as well as engineers.
There were some changes after we finished the design work, but few changes to the design-mainly to the elements. There were supposed to be a genuine Hab Module, and a similar Lab Module, and 4 Nodes, and 2 Cupolas. The program took far too long, and wound up far too expensive, and as they got deeper into money problems they threw out some pieces, like the Hab Module. In retrospect I believe this was a poor decision and did not save much money, beyond a Shuttle mission.
There are serious constraints when everything has to go into an aluminum tube that fits in a Shuttle. There are many trades, and leading trades in the case of ISS were for modularity, replaceability, accessibility, and cost efficient manufacture.
The approach to ISS when we started was to ‘buy it by the yard’. We were told to fit into an $8 billion initial budget, and that was never realistic, but, as long as we could build the first pieces and add more later, that approach was how we went.
Not everyone was always in agreement with all of our ideas, decisions and proposals, but the best ones won because we were able to show efficiency and effectiveness.
For instance, many engineers argued against the Cupola and these engineers almost had their way, throwing it out every few years for lack of ‘hard requirements’. I think narrow mindedness, short-sightedness were responsible for this thinking. Some of us fought repeatedly to get it back in and we typically came in with exactly the same rationale we had used to get it in in the first place. People had simply forgotten that this was a place for humans to live. Once ESA agreed to assemble the Cupola in exchange for US services, it stayed in the program. The Cupola is arguably the most livable space in the ISS.
And as far as being a space outpost where we learn to live in space, I would argue that ISS is doing exactly as we had planned. Many of the systems are testbeds for future capabilities. In fact we designed ISS, from the outset, as a series of components that could be used for future lunar and planetary missions and there were studies that looked at using ISS-based components in exactly this way. Every time NASA has tried to start a new program,
Constellation being a prime example, NASA’s tendency has always been to throw away the existing systems and start over. I think that is a serious waste. http://www.spacearchitect.o…
deleted pending some research.
Thanks for that link. I’ll take it to the beach with me this morning for perusal.
Also, once the program was novated from MacDac to Boeing Congress established a yearly spending cap. In order to stay under it decision was made to defer ops for DDT&E, notably the first two (because of where the program was in its development). In addition to the excellent work that was done on habitat development for the ISS, and all the consideration so ably listed above, deferring ops meant that some things driven by human factors analysis were put off until after systems were nailed down. The inevitable effect is a need for backwards engineering, wherein systems have to be brought into line with human factors considerations _after_ they are already designed or in the process of being built. This in turn always costs three times more than it would have but is a consequence of flat funding during DDT&E – which often resulted in compromises beng made. Nonetheless the vehicle operates beautifully, and despite the difficulties, many astronauts there for a typical tour of duty want to go back. As for it being a “smelly mess” – close cockpits and enclosed habitats on Earth stink too, let alone those under water (ever smelled a submarine?) – and those human factors folks who helped with the ISS also knew that. Airflow was looked at, but the best mechanism for dealing with it is the human olfactory system which rapidly habituates to smell. It just doesn’t bother one as much.
Moving on – From what I read in the past couple of days Lockheed Martin intends their “base camp” to operate as a field lab more than anything else. It’s unclear whether that means continually inhabited. From what little we can tell I don’t see anything in the design that rules out inflatable components. Finally the idea of multiple Orions is interesting if only because it might speed thngs along getting out to Mars (less development needed) and it means you don’t have to develop new methods of shielding a hab/lab from radiation, which is a nontrivial issue. Whether or not this approach is actually feasible, or makes sense in a larger architecture is unclear.
Point taken on the stinkiness…and of course the astronauts want to go back! Those folks spend a couple of years training for a mission!
More to the point, would ordinary folks want to live there? What lessons on livability can be drawn from ISS? What would need to change if we wanted to support communities? Sure this is far to the right, as you space boys like to say, but still. at some point humans will occupy space and we will do it IN space. Can we learn from studying human settlements on earth? How do we apply those lessons in space?
More to the point, how are the lessons from human geography implemented on ISS? What are the hits, and misses?
On the inflatables I’ve wondered how services are supplied as they join ISS.
I don’t fully understand your point about ops deferring “things driven by human factors analysis were put off until after systems were nailed down”?
Sorry for delay – I’m retired and was doing other things. Operational choices that should have been driven in part by human factors analysis of systems and how they functioned got put off until after the systems were already designed. In some cases that was fine because the designers got it right, in some cases it required extra training or interesting procedures to fit the human with the system (when what you want is the other way around) and in a couple of other cases it meant that systems had to be redesigned. That’s expensive in lots of ways, not solely because it is done more than once but because redesign can impact other systems. On ISS as on many other systems they tried to sequester those sorts of things into functionality that can be addressed with software, since software is easier to modify than hardware.
Every time NASA has tried to start a new program, Constellation being a prime example, NASA’s tendency has always been to throw away the existing systems and start over. I think that is a serious waste.
Couldn’t agree more.
Interesting and fruitful reading and thanks again for the link.
It’s probably fair to say that SLS killed habitability, at least in the sense that SLS was limited to 5M modules. An overstatement, but coupled with the exigencies of budget, in the end mostly the case.
But the one thing I noticed was the discussion of requiring utility chases in every node, which dramatically reduced the living area that was already handicapped.
That decision is analogous to the grid neighborhood– a layout with utilities notoriously expensive to construct and maintain. Compare modern neighborhoods where utilities can occur in a ring with short feeds to the homestead. ISS a system requiring interdependence of nodes (if I understand it correctly) with utility chases penetrating all nodes.
The discussion of early attempts to grok the process based on Skylab were especially enlightening, particularly the composition of the teams and willingness to entertain a variety of ideas.
Astronaut insistence on live views of exterior spaces was illuminating; I wonder if the same passion would hold given the quality of modern video sensors and displays.
While so many habitability components fell to the cutting room floor, the process was populated with wide and open thinking.
As you say, sir, privately developed living spaces have to be more livable because they have to satisfy market demand. Ordinary people prefer to live in homes, not in manifestations of some architectural theory or other.
Government-designed and sponsored living spaces have no such mooring to reality. Thus they are designed to satisfy the “needs” of the government functionaries in charge of their design and construction.
This is where the hellish public housing projects of the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s came from. Evidently the ISS bears a more than passing resemblance to a public housing project in space.
You are wrong, Mr. Eagle. Not wrong in your approach- that people live where they want. You are wrong that we haven’t learned from the mistakes of the past. Those ‘hellish’ projects- an apt term- are no more and good riddance. And the fact that this particular solution didn’t work does not obviate the problem being addressed.
More to the current discussion about ISS and lessons learned, I recommend the link above, which gives a succinct discussion of the prodigious thinking process that went into ISS.
That process wasn’t entirely successful. Inclusion of a human golgrapher and a couple of architects and land planners would have helped; the chief problem with ISS is the failure to comprehend ‘space’ as we use the term in the design biz.
But the process was thoughtful and useful nonetheless. And groundbreaking.
Design as a formal practice can serve at the strategic level, look at Apple but also the military for human-factors related work. Design should be part of systems projects from end-to-end, not just at the end.
God bless Steve Jobs. One human being who led the way showing that liberal arts matter.