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In designing habitats for long-duration space missions, one of the primary issues to address is that of sleep spaces, commonly known as Crew Quarters. While ergonomic design plays a major role in short-duration crew quarters (CQ) design, longer term missions must take into account the significant effect which environmental factors have on crew productivity; to that end, the establishment of private space for each individual crew member, as well as a range of semiprivate work and rest areas represents a significant departure from established norms in space habitat design. Both for proposed planetary habitats and microgravity habitats, various systems must be studied to enhance the wellbeing of the crewmembers.

In the period between mid-1997 and 2000, a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center broke with historical paradigms by developing the first endoskeletal space module. The value of this design was cost-effectiveness and efficiency, and also the possibilities its technical success has created for new forms to support human-rated vehicles and modules for exploration missions. The “TransHab Paradigm” is a complex, semi-inflatable vehicle whose two basic configurations - launch and deployed - are each optimized for their respective environments while retaining fundamental system integration for autonomy and efficient deployment. An early lesson of this new paradigm is its adaptability to a wide array of formal solutions for different sets of requirements.

The presence of windows in various building designs (e.g., offices, hospitals, houses, etc.) has been correlated with improved psychological well-being and performance. The application in hermetic environments of “virtual windows,” an electronic monitor integrated into an interior environment for viewing external landscapes, is expected to correlate with similar positive effects. In order to properly install virtual windows, the display content and the display characteristics need to be considered.