99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-07- 99% Alien

Episode Date: October 15, 2010

Humans need a few basic things to survive- air, water, food, heat, shelter- but just surviving isn’t really enough. We also need familiarity, a little comfort, interaction, a small place of our own. When it comes to designing space habitat … Continue reading →

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Spacecraft design is a study in humanity. At least that's what Mary Roach says. My name is Mary Roach. I'm the author of Packing for Mars, the curious science of life and the void. In the beginning, the designers of the space habitation modules. The box where the crew lives. Yep, that's the one. They stuck with what they knew.

Very few people had spent any time up there or in zero gravity. People had just intuitively designed it like a room on earth. There would be control panel and then there were little chairs. There were seats that you would sit and it makes no sense. In zero gravity you can't sit. You would have to strap yourself to the seat. The reason is simple. We are humans. When we have a room we have a floor and a ceiling we have chairs and tables and that's what we do and that's how it was designed. But getting stuff into space is expensive. So there's always a grand effort to minimize

weight and to create the most efficient space possible. And all those human comforts came under scrutiny. So then they went through the other extreme, get rid of it all, because in space, the walls become your table. If you have a table and you put something down on the table, the table doesn't act like a table. It doesn't hold it. It just floats off.

A drawer isn't very good. You open the door, everything flies out. So what you have is pieces of elastic on the wall Like, you know, you pull the elastic back and you stick your clipboard in there and everything has bits of velcro So the walls become the tables. You have a very bare Box that you're living in. So that became the game plan no furniture no ceiling no floor a perfect utilitarian box Or the astronaut floats freely and uses every surface to the fullest.

The great thing about zero gravity, we can use the ceiling, we could put the bathroom on the wall. But this is where the human factor comes in. The capsule became over-designed for the 0G condition, and it became too alien. The humanity was lost. The one thing that the crews decided that they were not okay

was getting rid of a kitchen table, like a dining table, a place to gather around at the end of the day, you don't know, sit down or pretend to sit down, and talk about what you did over the day, eat, shami were humans. Human beings want to sit around the table and gossip and talk about stuff and eat and drink.

And the table came back. It's a small table and there's little pieces of elastic and velcro and they all hover around the table. So despite that horrifying scene of alien, a table on a spacecraft makes for a happy astronaut. So in the living quarters, there's now an effort to use Earth orientation. The bottom part is the floor and ceiling above, walls or walls. The way that they cue them in is like the lighting will be up above.

So there's always ways so that you know what the accepted orientation is. Keeping one orientation helps in the constant war against motion sickness. And having everyone in the same orientation also helps the crew talk with one another. I interviewed this astronaut Lee Moran about how troubling it is to try to have a conversation

with somebody who is upside down when you were right-side up. We're sort of lip-reading all the time without realizing it. And he said, when you go beyond a 45-degree angle, the other person starts to have trouble reading your lips. So it's considered in polite to carry on a conversation with someone when you are upside down or when you are differently oriented. I love these examples and the fundamentals of other worldly space design because if you were to recreate that exercise right here in the gravity-based habitat and start from scratch, what would you redesign completely? Would everything simply evolve back to the way it is now?

Would US currency still be inexplicably uniform in color and size? Could we get rid of cars if we started over? Could we finally make the steam punkers happy and have a sky full of derogables? My guess is that even the poorly designed and inefficient objects would make come back, because it might just be your dining room table, your crappy, wobbly, a square-honey I will fix it soon, I promise it might be that dining room table that makes you happy astronaut. 99% Invisible is produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar.

It's a project of KLW, the American Institute of Architect San Francisco in the center for architecture and design. Find out more at 99%invisible.org.