NASA 02 Habitation

Since starting work at NASA, I have had the opportunity to work on quite a few different habitat concepts. Most habitation concepts involve cylindrical tanks of some sort, and if you can think of a configuration, chances are good that our NASA architects have tried it. Cylinders are good because next to a sphere, the cylinder is about as close as you can get to an ideal shape for a pressure vessel. And it is very difficult to design hardware to package neatly into a sphere. Sometimes the cylinders are configured vertically, sometimes horizontally, but in every scenario the physical design is always just a very small part of a much larger whole. An aerospace architecture team doesn’t simply design a space vehicle so much as they design a campaign. In the design, every aspect of a mission must be taken into consideration, such as mission duration, number of flights, other vehicles used, etc. Our group’s work on these projects runs the whole range from rough hand sketches and architectural layouts, to full sized mock-ups out of foamcore, cardboard or wood, so what you will see below are just snippets of a number of very intricately planned and well thought out exploration scenarios.