Human-Machine Interactions in Apollo and Lessons Learned for Living Off the Land on Mars

Human-machine interactions underpinned the resilience of Project Apollo to unplanned disturbances and were a critical factor in its success. We briefly describe 19 Apollo-era case studies in human-machine interactions involving unplanned disturbances from the vantage points of four stages of the system lifecycle: conceive, design, implement and operate. Using the System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA)diagrams on a representative selection of these cases, we explore how emergent system behavior in Apollo was constrained within boundaries consistent with mission success, and we abstract and generalize a key lesson learnt from each lifecycle stage. These were: (1) Human and machine shall each do what they are best at (2) clarity in the placement of the human-machine boundary enables realization of synergies from their interaction (3) concurrent optimization and testing of functions of humans and machines contributes to successful validation of complex system implementation (4) the costly development of trust between humans and machines underpins operational resilience in the face of internal and external disturbances. We then adapt and apply these lessons to the conceptual design process for future human-robot teams tasked with in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) on the Moon or Mars. We find that these Apollo learnings are transferable to Moon and Mars ISRU human-robot interactions, because the objective of `living off the land' on other worlds will be as new, as unproven, as mission-critical, and as difficult as safely landing humans on the Moon and returning them to Earth was in 1969. We also show that these learnings from Apollo are especially impactful if applied at the earliest stages of a complex system lifecycle, i.e. during the ideation of concept fragments for the future human exploration of Mars. These methods may be applied to systematically extract and transfer best practices in human-machine interaction between superficially dissimilar mission architectures.