A Prototype By 2018: This Is How NASA Preps For Deep Space And Mars

It’s Pretty safe to say that Mars and Deep Space are next. Unless there’s a study suggesting that our astronauts will surely die of some dangerous radiation, humanity should be prepping for these events.

At least that’s exactly what’s happening at NASA, as the agency plans to spend the next couple of years and even decades creating the futuristic technologies that will allow humans to spend years in space. The Advanced Exploration Systems unit within the NASA called it the habitation strategy.

According to its director Jason Crusan, they are following two goals: creating a long duration transit system that can allow humans to survive up to 1000 days hurtling into deep space and facilitating the emergence of low Earth orbit as a region populated by commercially-made habitats.

What they really want to achieve on top of all that is crystal clear though, building technologies that will allow us to live and work on Mars for almost 500 days at a time. Yes, that’s some serious ‘The Martian’ territory but hopefully without the heavy rationing. We’ve seen the (fictional) Mark Watney struggle, so it’s obvious that this goal remains a bit secretive.

Director Crusan discussed the various phases of the plan at a meeting with the NASA Advisory Council Human Exploration and Operations Committee outlining all facets of the habitation plan. All the designing, building and launching will become a huge task that is demanding absolute dedication by all persons involved.

It all starts with the International Space Station as a proving ground. All kinds of technologies and systems human astronauts need to rely on will be tested on the ISS first. Crusan pointed out that the habitation systems will be split into seven different categories with some of them already found in an early version on the ISS. The next few years are a critical time for testing these things out on the Space Station in order to convert them into a version that a deep space vessel can use. The categories in alphabetical order are:

• Crew health (instruments and protocols that are required to monitor vitals and diagnose or treat ailments)
• Cross-cutting (robotics, power, communications, docking, etc)
• Environmental Monitoring
• Fire safety (one of the most important)
• Life support (including water, waste, food and atmosphere management)
• Logistics (tracking, clothing, packaging, etc)
• Radiation Protection

In addition, NASA is trying to pushing commercial spaceflight companies to design and build more types of LEO habitation systems that can be built much faster and with fewer resources. In comparison, the ISS has been a pretty inefficient construction. Being the size of a football stadium it was necessary to construct it using a wide variety of different parts that were sent up on numerous launches. There’s probably been no better solution at that time, but to make future habitation structures work, efficiency is the key. Habitats that inflate and expand in space already prove to be a unique solution and companies like Boeing, Orbital ATK, and Lockheed Martin have all pitched concepts for their designs ready to be tested soon.

In a concerted effort that’s slowly turning Earth’s orbit over to the private industry for space research and operations, NASA gets the opportunity to expediently test out different kinds of habitation technologies as part of the design of a deep space vehicle. The overall goal is to have a prototype deep space habitat ready for ground testing by 2018.

At the end of the meeting, director Crusan admitted that the timeline will not be easy to follow and promoted a change of certain philosophies saying:

“The consequences will be so much higher in this Earth-Independent region that I don’t think we’ve fully thought through this […] We’re going to have to be very autonomous and take up only what’s necessary. “I want to stress, the idea is not to pick a specific solution at this phase but to look broadly at different systems and to parse through the advantages and disadvantages of each system. Some companies have a radically different approach,”

This article was originally published on pionic.