Designing NASA's New Moon Crib

I never expected to find myself working on a project with NASA, mainly because I wasn't particularly gifted in math or science. The most I remember from high school chemistry class was the teacher shouting, "That was spontaneous!" every time he caught us rolling wooden molecules across the linoleum floor.

Now, as an industrial design student heading into a second year of grad school at the Rhode Island School of Design, NASA is exactly who I'm working with. 

The connection bewteen RISD and NASA started with Michael Lye, my dedicated professor, throughout a decade of coursework that brought the two institutions together. Thing is, design school can be short on real-world constraints, often drifting into conceptual and theoretical regions, while NASA has no shortage of constraints.

It was a wonderful match.

I was hired along with four other students for a summer to work on NASA's new lunar lander suitlock/airlock project for the lunar habitat -- a setup the agency plans to use for extended stays on the moon. The major challenge facing astronauts once they arrive? Moon dust.

Inside an astronaut's living space, moon dust can be a big hazard by causing allergic reactions and grinding away at small parts in equipment. So NASA asked for a habitat that could keep lunar dust out.

Other factors we had to consider included strong, protective storage places outside of the living quarters and space suits tough enough to handle the moon's unforgiving conditions. Also, the astronauts needed to be comfortable in their spacesuits, able to reach the suit storage containers, and go into and out of the habitat safely and easily.

With Michael at our side, we took a first crack at the habitat and improved NASA's "Mark III" space suit design. It was essentially a clean slate: Help astronauts get into new one-piece-style suit, get out of the habitat, then get back safely. The rest was up to us.

After weeks of conference calls with the Human Factors team in Houston, we quickly found our tasks snowballing, and were proposing designs for dozens of things: the hinging mechanisms on the door, way-finding signals, foot and hand supports, bulkhead formations, airlock space, and on and on. The complexity of each spacey challenge quickly became apparent to us as we worked.

Our mission, however, wasn't all work and no play. A particularly fun phase came when we built a one-sixth gravity harness in our studio, then put the suit through a number of physical tests to see if it would hold up in true moon-like conditions. (Also check out the video at the end of this post.)

In mechanical engineering humans needs often come last, but we had to put the body first. We started by comparing the body with the original Mark III design. Unfortunately, the prototype is a multi-million dollar piece of equipment, so we couldn't physically get our hands on one. Instead, we spent weeks researching and talking to the makers, then constructed our own rendition of the suit -- keeping in mind the capabilities and limitations it put on the wearer, of course.

For example, could he or she see over her shoulder?  (Nope.) Asking such simple questions created a domino effect of design needs: When astronauts bend their knees in the suit, at what angle of knee bend did the suit and body weight become too great to push up to standing position? And so on.

Unlike countries that put restrictions on their spaceflyer height, American astronauts are a wide range of heights -- so the suitlock and airlock needed to be adjustable (yet another aspect we had to take into consideration). And after studying a set of gorgeous, custom-built astronaut gloves, we got a sense of how limited astronaut dexterity and mobility would be. That's a big deal, because we knew the astronauts would need to use small pieces of hardware. 

By starting with the design approach, I think we were able to innovate in ways we might not have if we began with a focus on engineering. In the long run, I hope our work creates a more comfortable (and productive) experience for astronauts visiting the moon.

Julianne Gauron is a second-year industrial design student at the Rhode Island School of Design. For more information about the RISD NASA collaboration see, click here.

Comments

[design institute]

Thanks for sharing you personal experience with us ... i saw the video .. you have worked beautifully even on small small things ... that is what expected by a name like NASA. Keep it up and best of luck ....

[johany]

Great article! thanks you for sharing