While expansion of space industry engineering standards over any human factors interface, except the humantechnology interface, is a still a relatively new topic (Dudley-Rowley & Bishop, 2002), even rarer still is the consideration of the latent challenges of long-duration space missions. A latent challenge in this venue could be a social, behavioral, or a natural or human-engineered environmental phenomenon. Manifest challenges to long-duration spaceflight are numerous enough, with mission planners, managers, and engineers taking into account obvious things like spacecraft operations, communications difficulties, having enough onboard resources, and protection of crew from an airless, microgravity environment fraught with radiation and other hazards. Latent challenges are harder to grasp. A latent challenge is any item, aspect, component, or process that potentially poses difficulties in the performance of mission objectives, but is something about which not much is known. However, a mission to Mars is a long-duration space mission that is a significantly different experience than a tour-of-duty of the same duration aboard a space station in full view of Earth, with easier access to new or needed equipment, more supplies, or even returnability. Social and behavioral phenomena in such an extreme environment could generate their own set of latent challenges. What steps could the crew take to ensure a high level of group functioning and minimize the impact to the accomplishment of mission objectives? How might design offset latent challenges on long-duration space missions? This report attempts to catalog the types of latent challenges that could pose difficulties to the longduration space mission, and then gives a multidisciplinary perspective of how design could respond to these challenges.
This paper reviews a design project for the interior of the Space Station Habitability Module carried out by a student/faculty team at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) supported by the Aerospace Human Factors Division at NASA-Ames Research Center from 1985 to 1988. At the time, NASA was planning to provide two full-length modules for the habitability of an 8 person crew on the Space Station. NASA later dropped both modules from the Station configuration for cost reasons. 20 years on, the paper revisits the SCI-Arc/Ames project, reviews the design processes involved and the physical products generated and offers lessons learnt that are relevant to the next cycle of design and development of human habitats for space exploration. The paper presents an overview of the SCI-Arc/Ames project which is fully described in two NASA reports published in the late 1980s and now available for downloading from the www.spacearchitect.org website.
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