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This paper presents an “Inquiry by Design” approach to the problem of architectural design for the crew habitat of an interplanetary vehicle. This habitat must meet a range of difficult requirements to protect the crew's health and safety during the approximately 6 to 12 month voyage each way. It must provide a habitable environment that affords the crew privacy, group activities, recreation, exercise, communications, training facilities, and health care. It must incorporate countermeasures against prolonged exposure, to zero gravity and shielding against radiation from solar flares and galactic cosmic rays. The design research involves the investigation of a prototype interplanetary habitat that incorporates substantial radiation shielding for the crew quarters and a human powered, short-arm centrifuge for zero gravity countermeasures. It includes private crew quarters, life support system, stowage and equipment volumes.

This paper questions the widely held assumption that a single crew habitat can serve equally well as both an interplanetary vehicle and as a Mars surface habitat. This paper argues that these two uses and the designs to support them are so fundamentally different that it is not possible to serve both optimally with the same habitat element. This distinction leads to a reassessment of the Mars Direct approach and similar mission architectures. As an alternative, this paper presents the Being There versus Getting There (BTvGT) approach, so-named because it comprehends the distinction between the two habitats and the mission scenarios that they support. The first distinction is the emphasis upon placing optimal facilities upon the Mars surface and in the interplanetary vehicle, even at the cost of greater total mission launch mass. This shift signifies a focus upon the quality and content of the masses involved, rather than just total undifferentiated tonnage delivered to the surface.

Radiation is the leading showstopper for long duration human exploration of the lunar surface. The need for an effective and safe radiation shielding material has become the “Holy Grail” of radiation protection research. This paper reports the results for one material in particular – carbon – in the “Bioshield” particle accelerator test of candidate radiation shielding at Brookhaven National Laboratory, sponsored jointly by NASA and the Italian Space Agency. Shielding samples were bombarded by both Iron and Titanium nuclei beams at1 GeV/n relativistic energy. This paper reports the results for Fe. The target behind the shielding was a lymphocyte culture; created using advanced cytogenetic techniques (premature chromosome condensation and fluorescence in situ hybridization). The shielding samples included aluminum, PMMA acrylic/Lucite, polyethylene, and lead.