Life Support/Crew Systems | Deep Space Systems

Life Support and Crew Systems

Deep Space Systems has employees who have worked on the Space Shuttle, International Space Station, and Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle Programs.

In addition we have supported Lockheed Martin's Advanced Programs Office in the development of concept and system designs for future human space exploration architectures, spacecraft, and systems.

Life Support

Health, Well-Being, and Productivity

DSS believes that Bioregenerative Life Support Systems (BLiSS) will be the cornerstone of successful long-duration human space
exploration missions, ultimately leading to permanent human presence beyond Earth.

We take the long view of the human and plant biomes as being a part of a "Living Systems" design that is integrated with hardware, automation, and software systems into a reliable, resilient, and pleasant crew environment.

Heating/ Cooling

This is a delicate balance that not only affects the astronauts, but all the systems around them as well.

Water

Water is an essential part of any mission that has humans.

Water can also be converted into breathable oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel.

Air Quality

Air quality fundamentally affects the physiology and well-being of the crew. Air trace constituent monitoring and air quality control are essential aspects of human space flight.

Food

Manned deep space missions will need to optimize palatability, storage density, nutrition, and shelf life of packaged food, using fresh food production to balance and supplement stored food.

Crew Systems

Balancing Automation, Ground-Support and Manual Control

Deep Space Systems's life support and crew systems designs focus on survivability first, with great attention to predicted reliability, probability of failure, and consequence of failure. For probabilistic effects, mitigations such as block redundancy, N+1 Redundancy, and similar and dissimilar Functional Redundancy are considered. Where the consequences of failure demand it and system resources allow it, independent emergency systems can expand the safety envelope.

Systems Accessibility

Systems have to be easily configurable and reachable.

Waste Management

This system has to be efficient as well as airtight in order to keep the astronauts clean and happy.

Emergency Systems

Most of these systems are automated but in extreme contingencies, there has to be a manual override.

Crew

Quarters

Making the most of limited resources to enhance crew comfort and well being.