Spacecraft Optimization Layout and Volume (SOLV): Development of a model to assess habitable volume

As future human space missions reach greater distances and span longer durations, designing spacecraft and habitats to better accommodate habitability functions and support crew health, performance and safety will become increasingly important. Mission planners and spacecraft designers need tools to help them better define habitable volume needs for future systems and identify mission and programmatic risks. Because spacecraft/habitat volume directly drives mass and cost, well-informed volume estimation and assessments early in the design process are key. The Spacecraft Optimization Layout and Volume (SOLV) project is a three-year project funded by a NASA Research Announcement Human Exploration Research Opportunities grant. It aims to develop a constraint-driven, optimization-based computational model that can be used by planners, designers and integrators during the early design phases to estimate and evaluate spacecraft/habitat volume based on mission attributes and critical task volumes, while providing a characterization of associated risks. This paper describes the initial efforts to develop the model architecture, including defining model inputs, outputs, variables, and constraints. It describes plans to use decision theory strategies to define and prioritize the level of information and interactions among the model factors in order to drive model logic. The SOLV model implements a “bottom-up” method of estimating volumes that considers multivariate attributes of the mission and crew tasks, an approach that aligns with a human-centered design philosophy. The model aims to support iterative design processes and help reduce design and mission risks through improvements in spacecraft volume design and operations.