Design for space

Inside the Command Module, Armstrong confronted no fewer than 650 switches, dials, motors, circuit breakers, controls and displays

Made by North American Rockwell, the Module was office, laboratory, television studio, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and gymnasium all rolled into one. After a lift-off surrounded by politicians, holidaymakers, surfers, hippies and youths sporting Confederate flags, it followed schedules to the minute. Then, watched by getting on for a billion television viewers, it brought its occupants back to the USS Hornet, there to receive a welcoming handshake from Richard Nixon.

A lot has changed since those heady eight days and half a million miles. But in the world of design back on Earth, both the lessons of the Apollo 11 mission and the advances being made in space today have import.

Forget about non-stick frying pans, spin-off and all the rest. The benefits of the US space programme were subtler than the few consumer product innovations to which apologists for NASA endlessly referred. They lay more at the level of systems than at that of technologies. The first of those systems was Man himself.

Decades after Edward Muybridge’s pioneering photographic studies of man in motion, it took Apollo for scientists to come to grips with the mechanics of walking and running. Behind Armstrong’s euphoric jumps around the Sea of Tranquility lay extensive research into the trade-off between potential and kinetic energy in humans. That research helped the US Army to design better backpacks for its infantrymen; it helped the US rehabilitation industry to invent better mobility aids for the disabled.

Ergonomics, the science of what is unpoetically known as the man-machine interface, received a tremendous boost from Apollo. We learnt how to cool astronauts with undergarments of fine plastic tubes filled with water at 0-5°C. We learnt how to help Armstrong with his 650 toggles and read-outs. Above all, we learnt about the simulation of one-sixth gravity lunar environments. Space taught us how to deal with arduous conditions more successfully.

What has space to offer us today? Little, it seems, by way of exotic breakthroughs in metallurgy and the production of alloys: metals are too weighty, metal-forming gadgets too dear to take into space in the manner that once was hoped. More relevant to designers, it seems, are the long-term, farsighted endeavours of 3M in space. 3M has already patented an organic thin film which, by being denser, smoother and more homogenous than Earth-grown equivalents, should speed the development of the materials used in optoelectronics. Through experiments in space, the company is also poised to make advances in polymers, as well as better laser-recorded optical disks.

There are other marks of progress, too. Satellite-collected data already help suburban planners to align roads more accurately. Beginning in 1996, America’s $15 billion, 25-year ‘Mission to Earth’ will, with luck, supply the information with which to arrest the spread of deserts and the denuding of forests. Oddly enough, however, it is probably the efforts of the Eastern bloc in space that are most pregnant with principles of design for the 1990s.

We need not dwell on China’s ability to process, on a commercial basis, materials aboard an unmanned spaceship that comes complete with a re-entry shell made of wood. Nor need we pause long on the contempor­ary signs of perestroika in the heavens. Rather, it is the whole duct and logistical infrastructure surrounding Mir, the Russians’ permanently manned space station, which really impresses.

It’s no fun spending a year on Mir, as two Soviet cosmonauts have done. Despite the provision of personal cabins and a regular supply of video­tapes, conditions among a morass of cables and bulkheads are tough – worse, it’s said, than those on a submarine, and certainly bad enough to make the optimal tour of duty no longer than six months long. But, unlike the US space station Freedom, which will not be built before 1996, Mir can receive fuel and cargo from unmanned spacecraft, not just from manned shuttles. That makes for remarkable flexibility in mission planning and control.

So, also, will the Soviets’ two- or three-man space-plane, a kind of mini shuttle for transport, satellite inspection and rescue operations, and one that the US has yet to emulate. Above all, though, the multi-port construction of Mir allows for a total of six spacecraft to dock with it, so enabling its six inhabitants to receive full-sized Buran shuttles, send them fully-laden back to Earth, add fresh laboratories, and so on.

For Buran (‘Snowstorm’), the Soviets have quite openly copied the US shuttle’s design. But in general they prefer expendable launcher rockets to re-usable shuttles. They have a diverse portfolio of 10 different launchers, most of which are long-proven vehicles produced in quantity: indeed the SL-4, the one they still use for manned flights, has blasted off 900 times in the past 25 years.

Of course, the Soviets do throw money at their space programmes, and recent Western speculation has it that they may have to make cutbacks. But with Energiya, their colossal new launcher, their approach is again interesting. Able to put 100,000kg in low orbit, Energiya uses four units of another previously developed launcher as boosters around its chunky central cylinder. The method, then, is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

A mixture of advances and set­backs characterises all space design in 1989. Punchier hydraulics and denser, more sophisticated electronics, for example, make heat exchangers vital; similarly, the multiplication of wires is proving a burden both in weight and in volume. However, in basic philosophy, the Soviet attack on space has much to recommend it to designers of complex terrestrial systems.

Go for simple, mass-produced, disposable workhorses – not over-intricate, craft-built, recyclable thoroughbreds. Go for a wide range of automatic and non-automatic machines, so you can build a complete but flexible infrastructure. Go for imitation, where that makes sense. Finally, follow Apollo. Build your structures out of modules, and one day you’ll reach those stars.