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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.

Over the past two decades, the emergence of mature associative geometry modeling tools and the related sophistication in connected design/manufacture processes has enabled the design and realization of more complex, nonlinear structures. These techniques, first applied in the aerospace industry and currently being explored by architects, have matured into tools that can be used to optimize complex structural systems with irregular geometry. Potential advantages of this approach include: reduced mass penalty; optimized ECLSS and power sizing and performance; lower risk and lower cost in manufacturing; and flexibility, or the ability to customize individual vehicles according to function. One area of space architecture where constraint driven design can become an invaluable tool is in the optimization of space inflatable habitats. The first endoskeletal hybrid space module - TransHab – was developed in the late 1990s at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.