GoKawiilAs the Artemis II astronauts prepare for the most dramatic and potentially dangerous part of their mission — reentry into Earth’s atmosphere — the eyes of the world will be on the Orion capsule and the people inside it. Getting glimpses into the capsule during the mission, the public has been able to observe the features of the astronaut’s lives, from the screens where they receive messages from Earth to the bathroom they use and how it was fixed when it broke.
Every single piece of technology in the Orion capsule has been designed not just to withstand the epic G-forces of launch and landing, but also to optimize for human interfacing. And those human factors — the personal, sometimes intangible feeling of interacting with technology that just works in a way that is intuitive and enhances daily life — are now at the forefront of spacecraft design.
“A lot of design is actually organization of information.”
The first and foremost principle of human factors has always been safety. That means safety for the crew, and secondarily, safety for the spacecraft as well. The capsule undergoes rigorous testing to ensure that it can withstand the tremendous forces of reentry, but so do seemingly mundane objects, which become crucially important.
When you are preparing to smash into the atmosphere at a speed of almost 25,000mph, you better make sure that you’re sitting in a well-designed seat, for example.
“Seats can save lives,” says Olga Bannova, director of the space architecture graduate program at the University of Houston. Seats must handle massive impact loads while transferring as little force as possible to the astronauts sitting in them, and good seat design is considered the most effective way to prevent injuries during landing, especially during emergencies. Seats need to be comfortable, even when astronauts have extreme G-forces pushing them into the seat during reentry, but they also need to provide support to delicate human frames while allowing natural movements.
Orion’s seats are “designed to accommodate nearly 99 percent of the human population,” according to NASA, and are adjustable to account for individual variation and to allow movements to reach important controls even when wearing a pressure suit. They can also be dismantled and packed away if needed, to give the crew more room to work in the small capsule space.
These same G-forces that act on the seats make it difficult for astronauts to even lift their hands to touch a control screen at times, so the Artemis II astronauts will use control devices like the rotational hand controller, which looks a bit like a joystick, or the cursor control device, which has similar inputs to a gamepad, in order to interact with the spacecraft even when larger physical movements are difficult or impossible.
Interior of the Orion Medium Fidelity Mockup at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on May 11, 2016. Image: NASA
Human factors go beyond just covering safety basics. Designers are increasingly considering psychological factors like comfort and privacy for space missions, such as giving astronauts their choice of sleeping options. Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman said this week, for example, that he likes to sleep under Orion’s displays to be nearby in case anything goes wrong, but his fellow astronaut Christina Koch prefers to sleep “suspended like a bat,” while pilot Victor Glover likes to tuck himself into a small nook near the ceiling.
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