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Space Inflator

Last December TransHab was inflated for the first time. In a control room overlooking a giant vacuum chamber at Houston's Johnson Space Center, a dozen engineers sat patiently, trading jokes and sci-fi movie trivia, while NASA technicians meticulously adjusted temperature and pressure valves, and the three-story, $200 million house designed for the first Mars colonists slowly took shape.

By Nina Rappaport

Architect Constance Adams never expected that one of her first built projects would be a giant balloon on Mars.
(photo: Rick Stiles)

click here to see the photos and
captions for this article

"It was about as exciting as watching grass grow," architect Constance Adams tells me. Her nonchalance is less than convincing. Inflating the TransHab may have taken 12 hours, but until that day she and her colleagues had never had a good look at what they'd been working on for almost two years--what they hope will become the first manned inflatable structure in space.

Adams, an intense woman in her early thirties with sharp dark eyes, is one of the few architects in a sea of engineers and scientists at NASA. At an agency where architects often feel they have to justify their place on the payroll, she's been given a daunting task: to make the TransHab--short for "transit habitat"--well, habitable. If she succeeds, she may do more than change the way NASA thinks about architects; she may change the way the rest of us think about architecture.

Her path to NASA was a circuitous one. After graduating from Yale Architecture School in the early 1990s, she worked for Kenzo Tange in Tokyo and Josef Paul Kleiheus in Berlin, where she focused on large projects, from office buildings to city plans. But in 1996, when urban renewal efforts in Berlin began to slow down, she returned to the United States.

While visiting her father, a history professor, in Houston, she took a tour of the Johnson Space Center, and quickly made up her mind to stay. "How could the child of a historian resist?" she asks. "This is the big historical effort of our time. NASA cares less about how things are traditionally done, because there are no real traditions yet [associated with] putting people into space."

But as Adams soon discovered, an absence of tradition has its drawbacks.
Just three years earlier, NASA had set up a bioplex, a laboratory for testing technologies that might eventually be used in the Mars habitat--closed-loop, advanced life-support systems that recycle air, water, and waste. The bioplex's eight airtight chambers simulate the conditions of life in space for crew members, and Adams' assignment was to design their living quarters. With the project's short history, though, there was little in the way of research for her to go on.

In order to determine the basic requirements for making a space habitat livable, she interviewed the American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts who had served for at least a year on the ill-fated Mir space station. Working with NASA psychologist Janis Connolly and mathematician Francis Mount, she collected data about personal habits and socialization patterns, and began to develop what she calls "socio-ergonomic analysis," a way of understanding how, in closed habitats, members of a group behave almost as if they were a single entity.

But a Mars mission lasts at least two years--a lot longer than a quick trip to the moon or a typical tour of duty on a space station--and Adams and her colleagues were still a long way from figuring out what goes into making the kind of place where six people can coexist happily for extended periods.

There were technical problems as well. Although by the time Adams signed on to the project, NASA engineers had agreed that the structure should be inflatable, that's about all that was agreed on.

Using inflatables in space isn't a new idea, but it's traditionally been considered more the stuff of science fiction than science. NASA architect Kriss Kennedy, who has spent years developing lunar exploration systems, was an early champion of inflatables. To him, they just made sense: He had researched what he calls "the psychology of isolation" and found that most people need a certain volume of space to live comfortably. Of course, if you plan to set up house on the moon or Mars, your living space has to be compact enough to be shipped there--more compact, probably, than its occupants would like. Unless it's inflatable. Then it not only takes less space to ship, it also weighs less (a mere 26,000 pounds) and is cheaper to transport.

Kennedy wasn't the first to think of this. The Russians experimented with inflatables in the early Sixties, and John Frassanito, an industrial designer who worked with Raymond Loewy on the design for Skylab in the early 1970s, proposed that NASA consider using inflatables, to no avail. Engineers just couldn't figure out how to make sure inflatables stayed rigid--especially in space, where even the toughest material can be punctured by micrometeors.

TransHab, then, is a watershed design for several reasons, not the least of which are its materials and its endoskeletal structure. With a foot-thick exterior of bulletproof Kevlar webbing--reinforced by additional layers of polyurethane foam, polymer film, and Nextel, a ceramic fabric--it can withstand projectiles traveling at more than four miles per second. "It's like a cross between the Michelin man and a Fabergé egg," Adams says. "Or maybe it's more like a transformer doll. When the outside inflates, it becomes three times its launch volume."

When Kennedy recruited her to work on the TransHab project in 1997, Adams was determined that they should make the most of that space. She began by evaluating the existing designs. "The layout was unusable," she says. "It was a pinwheel plan going in five different directions--the crew would never have been able to orient themselves. And I knew they were wasting volume." Adams' counterproposal--a much simpler, split-level plan--became the basis for the TransHab prototype that will be tested as part of the International Space Station in 2004.

That was the easy part. These days, while the now deflated habitat lies lifeless in the vacuum chamber awaiting further tests, Adams is furiously working to develop TransHab's interior systems, all of which must be completed in record time if it is to be launched on schedule.

So far, she and her colleagues have designed the bathrooms, exercise areas, and sick bays that will be located on the top floor. They've designed sleeping and work quarters for a crew of six, which will be part of the second level, along with an enclosed mechanical room and the radiation-shielding water tanks that line the structure's central core. Adams has also been working on a conference room for the first level, with an Earth-viewing window and video monitors for space-to-ground communications.

She's still developing an interior trusswork system that locks into position between the floor struts, creating walls that accommodate racks of life-support equipment and shelves that can be rearranged to create what she calls "furniture"--tables and places to sit.

And she's currently collaborating with Yale professor Kent Bloomer, a former teacher of hers, on developing interior details and hardware. Last fall, Bloomer passed the assignment on to his students, asking them to rethink the idea of ornament for the most modern setting imaginable.

"In a Gothic cathedral," Bloomer says, "the job of ornament is to connect to the heavens--from the smaller details to the rose window, which is the cosmic diagram, a metaphor for the relationship of the Earth to the cosmos." As Bloomer sees it, it's only a short leap from the cathedral to the TransHab. "There's a symmetry between that and the spaceship. One of the functions of the ornament was to get you home again."

In fact, as Adams discovered during her bioplex research, space travelers are constantly in search of a substitute for the horizon most of us take for granted on Earth. "Ornament gives the crew a frontier, a place to go to," Bloomer says. "It gets them past the horror of where they are, which is what the cathedral is doing."

In a way, that's also what Adams has been doing. With her help, the first colonists on Mars may actually feel at home.


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