Could the design of a spacecraft affect astronauts’ mental health? Scientists have mapped how everything from lighting and privacy to shared spaces could shape wellbeing on long missions to the Moon and Mars.
Scientists have mapped how different features of a space habitat could affect astronauts’ mental, emotional and social well-being, in a new study.
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Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States examined links between features such as lighting, privacy and the layout of living spaces, and experiences including anxiety, homesickness, fatigue and relationships between crewmates.
The idea is to give engineers a clearer way to consider astronauts’ mental health when designing habitats for long-duration space missions.
“The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult,” Mich Lin, a lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT, said in a press release.
“We’ve come a long way from the human in a tin can. As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important,” she added.
In extreme environments, habitats are usually built primarily for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases and spacecraft must protect people from immediate physical dangers, often with very limited space.
Spaceflight can put astronauts under considerable psychological strain. Isolation and confinement can affect sleep, mood, cognitive performance and relationships within a crew, while living without normal day-night cycles can disrupt the body's circadian rhythm.
But as humans prepare for longer missions to the Moon and eventually Mars, astronauts could spend months or even years confined with the same small group of people, far from family and friends and with little opportunity to leave their surroundings.
How much can design help?
Researchers carried out an extensive, iterative review of scientific literature on habitability in space and other extreme environments to find evidence linking physical surroundings with behavioural health.
They used the research to build a map containing 68 factors and 167 connections showing how aspects of an environment could influence behavioural health and performance.
They focused on 14 emotions and experiences that could be affected by habitat design, including anxiety, autonomy, curiosity, fatigue, nostalgia and kinship.
They then mapped how different design factors could contribute to these outcomes.
Lighting, for example, can affect sleep and circadian rhythms. The amount of privacy available to crew members could influence stress and autonomy, while the arrangement of shared spaces, corridors and entrances can shape how often people interact with one another.
Meanwhile, access paths, stairs and entrances can contribute to friendships and social cohesion because they influence how often people naturally encounter one another.
Researchers also suggest looking at features that can help astronauts develop a stronger attachment to where they live in order to reduce homesickness. These could include greater privacy and spaces that crew members can reconfigure or personalise.
“The connection between habitat and behavioural health has not been made in this format before,” Lin said. “So we made those connections for the first time.”
The research team says the same approach could also be applied on Earth, including to submarines, oil rigs, Antarctic expeditions and other environments where people spend long periods isolated and confined.
Researchers have also made the findings available through an interactive website called the Human-Environment Connection and Interaction Atlas (HECIA), where designers can explore the different connections.
However, the researchers stress that the tool and the ideas behind it are not a one-size-fits-all guide to designing extreme habitats. The appropriate design will depend on each habitat’s particular specifications and constraints.
