Fourth- and fifth-year students in the Advanced Option Space Studio traveled last week to Houston, TX to visit the Johnson Space Center, the NASA campus devoted to designing and testing human space missions.
Under the direction of Ann Kalla Professor Christina Ciardullo and at the invitation of NASA's veteran space architects, students toured mission control; viewed a remote launch; wandered through full scale mock-ups of space shuttles, ISS modules, and future habitat demonstration units; and spoke with astronauts training on the pool deck of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab.
NASA's space architects, who have been designing theoretical and prototype space habitats for nearly 30 years, joined aerospace engineers, designers, and astronauts for a review of SoA students' design ideas for the future of human settlement on Mars. Central to the discussion was the role of architects in interdisciplinary design and problem solving, and considerations for human survivability, sustainability, and habitability in extreme environments.
