APPROACH

New-era astronauts.

Human space exploration has always been driven by goals to achieve a specific mission on a specific timeline. Near term, that won’t change much. What will change is the type of people selected to go on missions and what those missions entail.

The next generation of space explorers will be neither the highly-trained astronauts we’re familiar with today nor casual space tourists; this group represents the future workforce beyond LEO.

The next generation of space explorers will be neither the highly-trained astronauts we’re familiar with today nor casual space tourists; this group represents the future workforce beyond LEO. For the foreseeable future, this space workforce won’t be pushing new frontiers, but they will usher in a new wave of scientific discoveries and lay the groundwork for an off-world economy. They’ll also challenge our current understanding of what it means to be an astronaut.

Astronauts today are a bit like professional athletes; their bodies and minds have been conditioned specifically for going to and living in outer space—the most extreme environment imaginable. They train and rehearse together, operate in dramatic situations, and make extraordinary decisions as a team in service of a single mission.

Future space explorers will require some training to live and work in space, but nothing close to the advanced training and educational programs astronauts currently confront. Missions will be varied, and the people assigned to those missions will most often be strangers to one another other with different goals and motivations.

Teague has collaborated with publicly funded agencies like NASA, as well as private space companies, and aerospace OEMs for years. Our specialized expertise in designing for space, including a deep understanding of current users and future use cases, makes us uniquely qualified to conceptualize a preferred future for living and working in space.

Design drivers for mission success.

From manufacturing to mining, medicine, and beyond, the work being done in space will be as varied as the workforce is diverse. With improving mission outcomes as our top priority, we centered our work on user goals rather than preferences. Three key design drivers with mission performance indicators emerged.

Optimized productivity.

One of the greatest opportunities resulting from the commercialization of space is to design new experiences that don’t rely on legacy systems. In fact, designing for space demands it. It costs thousands of dollars to put a pound of payload into outer space, so every product has to earn its spot. On the Moon, digital interfaces won’t be confined to screens because they can’t be. Screens don’t last long enough, and they’re too heavy. Fortunately, the technology we’re working on now with companies like AWS, Intel, and Google will evolve and mature into a perfect fit for lunar life. Workers on the moon will engage with natural user interfaces (NUI) that understand natural language commands, behaviors, and gestures.

The combination of a NUI with a wearable device will improve task completion and increase efficiencies with real-time notifications, and quick access checklists, and step-by-step instructions at the ready. Interfaces, and all the information they contain, simply fade away when not in use. Significant gains are achieved by providing only the right information at the right time.

Another advantage of NUI, there are no screens cluttering up the physical environment. NUIs also eliminate the omnipresence of physical notes, charts, graphs, and gigantic three-ring procedure binders hanging around to distract the eye. Future habitats won’t be tiny houses, but they will be small. Separating work and home life has proven to lower stress and improve productivity.

That said, not all boundaries need to be physical. Outer space happens to be the perfect playground for the metaverse—perhaps the only place having a parallel to our physical world actually makes sense. But more on that later…

Design for state of mind.

On Earth, when we think about creature comforts, we picture things like a comfortable bed or hot shower. What we’ve learned talking to astronauts over the years is that comfort is more of a state of mind than a collection of things or experiences; comfort in outer space comes from familiarity that is grounded in the human experience. In our research, that’s most often articulated as a connection to our natural world—more specifically, a sense of time and purpose, human connections, and the color green.

Maintaining strong bonds with family and friends is mission-critical; supporting emotional wellness leads to improvements in quality of life and productivity gains that increase mission effectiveness.

Time is a human construct, but it’s an important one. The human body runs on a circadian clock that naturally resets every day by the sun’s light/dark cycle. A lunar day, when sunlight is cast on the Moon’s surface, is about 14 Earth days; a lunar night is the same duration, which means 14 days of light, followed by 14 days of dark. And a severely disrupted circadian rhythm. Dynamic lighting scenes designed to replicate Earth’s light/dark cycle will help manage circadian rhythms to promote better performance.

A circadian approach to lighting design will also provide a sense of time that supports human connections back on Earth. This is especially important for the future space workforce; there will be 239,000 miles between people living on the Moon and everyone they love—loneliness is a known biopsychosocial stressor that can be detrimental to physical and mental health. Maintaining strong bonds with family and friends is mission-critical; supporting emotional wellness leads to improvements in quality of life and productivity gains that increase mission effectiveness.