A Design Pattern Language for Space Stations and Longterm Residence Human Spacecraft

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present the beginnings of an architectural design pattern language for use in studying and designing space-based human habitats. At present, the space habitat pattern language consists of 60 patterns, arranged into 4 hierarchical categories, derived from the history of space-station designs ranging from Salyut 1 to Skylab, Mir, and the International Space Station. This paper discusses the pattern language and how it was derived, presents a selection of its constituent patterns, presents instructions on how to use it when developing requirements, illustrates how it can be used in conceptual design studies, discusses how it can be extended and applied to Moon and Mars landers, and concludes with a discussion how to continue to develop the language. I. Introduction In 1977, Christopher Alexander (Alexander et al.,1977), an architect, builder, and scholar, along with a group of colleagues, published a book called A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction in which they introduced the concept of the architectural design pattern, pattern discovery and analysis, and the pattern language. They proposed these ideas as a way of rigorously codifying the things that make certain aspects of a building's, or region's, organization good in certain situations and bad in others. The basic idea behind design patterns when applied to buildings, or other artifacts with which people interact, is: from a history of actual designs, recurring architectural solutions to specific life problems, called patterns, can be identified. Also, these are not just any repeated solutions, but ones that promote human activity in some positive way. The patterns that Alexander discusses do not specifically deal with matters of style, aesthetics or technical implementation, but with arrangements of architectural elements and their ability to solve organizational problems inherent in the activities of people. So, patterns and pattern discovery are a means of finding and communicating apparently implementation invariant, organizational design principles from a legacy of specific design solutions to problems that have also proven to enhance people's well-being. They also show how patterns link together to form a language from which new building designs can be generated that incorporate these timeless solutions into new projects. The methods of design pattern discovery, analysis and language creation can be applied to the history of long duration crewed spacecraft - the Salyuts, Skylab, Space Shuttle, Mir, and the International Space Station - to extract design solutions that have essentially remained invariant over time. This information can then be used to augment the requirements development and discovery phase of the development of new human spacecraft that might be used for trips to Mars, our Moon, or for other space station-like craft, in order to help insert good solutions from the past into future forms. This paper will discuss the basic principles of design patterns and pattern languages; present a space residence design pattern language derived from the history of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) space stations; present a selection of example patterns, discuss how this information can be used during preliminary design, and requirements specification; and conclude by discussing how it might be extended to work on the development of Moon or Mars landers.