The members of the Mars 500 study who stayed inside a habitat for 520 days. Image: ESA
When it comes to building the interior of a spacecraft, engineers often prioritize function over aesthetics, focusing on materials and hardware that are both safe and effective for executing the vehicle’s intended mission. But some scientists say it’s time to consider another crucial factor when designing a spacecraft’s insides: how it will affect the behavior of the passengers?
For astronauts traveling vast distances — perhaps on a trip to Mars — the design of a spacecraft’s interior could be a critical tool for keeping people happy and healthy during the journey. Room will likely be limited on any vehicle we send to the Red Planet; getting massive objects into space takes a lot of energy and money, so the interiors on these transports could be tight. And passengers will be stuck with the same group of people for the entire ride — a trip that could take years to complete. All of those conditions could create a nightmare scenario for a person’s psychological health, causing stress, bad sleep schedules, depression, and other negative feelings that might affect their time in space.
That’s why a new workshop next week plans to address this often-overlooked aspect of space travel. Called Space^2, the event will bring together astronauts, health professionals, and design experts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss what types of technologies and hardware deep space missions can include inside their spacecraft to make interplanetary journeys a more enjoyable experience. Up until now, astronauts have mostly experienced short trips to space, usually lasting less than a year. Because of this, spacecraft interiors have revolved around optimizing volume and less on giving people peace of mind. And some experts say that needs to change.
“Not much has been done in terms of the design and interior of the spacecraft,” Dorit Donoviel, director for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health and one of the conference organizers, tells The Verge. “It’s really about where they want to place their levers, their displays, what kind of materials they’ll use in terms of preventing bacterial growth. I don’t think there’s been too much emphasis on the behavioral or really the human side of some of these interior environments.”
Unfortunately, there isn’t a ton of research out there to guide engineers on the best spacecraft design for keeping astronauts in good spirits. That’s because conducting research on isolation can be tough to pull off. “These are difficult experiments to do ethically anywhere in the world, really,” Ted Smith, director of the Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil at the University of Louisville, tells The Verge. “There’s really a lot more that we don’t know than we do know about how the social psychology and the personal individual psychology degrades when circumstances degrade.”