Then there's the unsettling possibility that when the crew gets to Mars and starts to orbit, they find they're unable to land due to dust storms or other hazardous weather. If that happens, "there is the potential that they will be required to live in a transit habitat"—the environment inside of a spacecraft where astronauts live during their journey—"for up to three years," says Michael Morris, one of the architects on the team behind the Ice House.
What happens it the transit habitat becomes, well, just the habitat?
Morris, who is also a visiting architecture professor at Pratt Institute in New York, is tackling this problem with the help of his students. Together with industrial design professor Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, the pair spent the last school year teaching an undergraduate course that asked architecture and industrial design students to design a transit habitat that would be provide an aesthetically pleasing and functional environment for a potentially multi-year stay. Morris and Pailes-Friedman were able to create the class thanks to NASA's X-Hab grant for students, and the students had access to many NASA employees and resources.
The idea for the class was to lend a designer's perspective to the NASA engineers and scientists working on space travel. "So much about space research is supporting life up there, so everything comes down to calculation; everything is quantified," says Pailes-Friedman. With access to NASA's engineering know-how, the design students could think broadly about how to design a transit habitat that met the astronauts' needs while still enhancing their well-being.
