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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 explores the issues of integrating all the elements necessary to support a healthy and productive crew in a space habitat. The problem of this system integration hinges largely upon the nature of the structural system, both of the primary pressure envelope and the internal secondary structure of floors, partitions, hard points and stand-offs. This habitat integration must accommodate the life support system, stowage, private quarters, group activity areas, and working areas. The working areas may include laboratories, control centers, maintenance and repair facilities. Human factors engineering design stands as a challenge throughout the habitat. The distinction between an interplanetary habitat for zero gravity and a planetary surface habitat for a gravity field serves as an important design driver and discriminator. Environmental effects such as ionizing radiation, ultraviolet radiation, meteoroids, extremes of hot and cold act as determining factors as well.

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.