The Design Dozen

Chee Pearlman

Design's Next Frontier

CONSTANCE ADAMS: As a designer for NASA, Adams is no stranger to the requirements of long-term space missions. But as a professional architect, she also brings her own sensibility. Designing for space travel shouldn't be the domain of just left-brain engineers, she believes, but also of right-brain humanists. Adams thinks about design by looking at the Earth's ecosystem; she wonders, for example, why a space module couldn't have a barrier of clean water around it to protect astronauts from cosmic radiation, much as the Earth's atmosphere protects us. And she wants to provide space travelers with some amenities of home--like a sense of time, place and wellness--which is tough in a zero-gravity space capsule. With a group of Yale students, she developed a patterned wall fabric that could be used in a space vehicle to tell up from down.

In the late 1990s, Adams helped design TransHab, a spaceship for the first human mission to Mars. Anything rocketing into space has to be less than 14 feet in diameter. Her solution? Inflatable modules that could grow to three times their launch volume. "We could divide the module into different zones, where astronauts could work, exercise, sleep and socialize around the clock, which is not possible in a 'can' habitat," says Adams.

Budget cuts have stalled TransHab, but Adams continues to work on design problems, big and small. Recently she's experimented with a corn-based resin that can be injection-molded into storage containers. (Ordinary plastic gives off dangerous gases in space.) "With all the things that go up there, we need a system that you can see into, like Tupperware," she says. And why shouldn't astronauts have all the comforts of home?

Chee Pearlman