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The Columbus Attached Pressurised Module (APM) Active Thermal Control System (ATCS) water loop collects the APM waste heat and transfers it to the Space Station Freedom (SSF) Central Thermal Bus (CTB). The interface between the APM water loop and the SSF ammonia loops is achieved with two ammonia/water interloop heat exchangers (IH/X), one being low temperature (LT) and the other moderate temperature (MT). The APM internal water loop provides cooling to payload and subsystem users which have varying temperature requirements at their heat rejection interfaces, and can be categorized as cold branch and warm branch users, (e.g. condensing heat exchanger (CHX) and refrigerator are cold branch users, while Avionic heat exchanger (AHX) and furnace payloads would be warm branch users.)

In the overall planning of a manned mission to Mars, all the issues related to human involvement are critical. To a certain extent, they dictate the most severe constraints on the mission scenario and spacecraft architecture. Despite this unanimously recognized importance, limited efforts have been devoted up to now to dedicated research activities on human-related aspects, partially neglected w.r.t. more technical areas like orbital dynamics, propulsion, power generation, etc. This paper summarizes the major results of a survey on the human factors of long duration missions performed by Alenia Spazio in the frame of an ESA study, MARSEMSI, whose aim was to identify possible scenarios and related infrastructure requirements for a manned mission to Mars.

In the frame of the HERMES re-orientation activities, a set of studies has been started to define the most suitable scenario for a Man Transportation System (MTS). The possibility to use a non-winged vehicle to cope with different missions and requirements has been widely investigated, in a competitive study lead by Alenia Spazio as System responsible and performed in collaboration with Dassault Aviation. The study has concentrated first on the selection, from a large number of candidate shapes, of 2 promising vehicle concepts, one in the family of blunt bodies and one in the family of slender bodies. Then the design of the two selected shapes and the assessments of their expected performances have been investigated in greater detail in order to consolidate and validate the conclusions of the trade-offs performed during the first part of the study. This paper focuses on the thermal control issues of the two selected vehicle shapes.