Sponsor OSMED to Shape the
Future of Human Spaceflight

Space is hard.  Human spaceflight is even harder.  What institutional knowledge exists has until recently only been the purview of NASA and other government agencies.  Success in commercial human spaceflight requires companies to understand more than aerospace engineering and human factors.  The last 70 years of government spaceflight have shown us a vision of what is needed to reach and remain in Low Earth Orbit, but that has been achieved at cost levels that are unsustainable for an emerging industry.

Since 2000, we have had astronauts living and working in space on the International Space Station.  We have used the ISS as a platform to learn how to stay in space longer, how the human body changes and adapts as we do, how to push forward our technology, and how to perform various types of work in space.  Despite the amount of time and money spent on leveraging the capabilities of the ISS, we still do not understand enough about human health and performance in space to achieve levels of risk in spaceflight that would enable us to expand our missions safely (start us along the path that the aviation industry took).  

In other words, what we have accomplished to date isn’t enough.  To truly enable a human spaceflight-based economy, spaceflight has to be safe.  In the current models, we have historically reduced human risk by flying only the most accomplished and healthy people available.  As we expand this industry, access to space must expand.  This means including people who do not fit the previous mold of NASA astronauts: people who have imperfect medical histories and people who are differently abled–people who bring both the gifts and burdens of being human along with their own reasons for going to space.  This expansion must occur and must occur as safely as possible if human spaceflight is to continue.  

In the 2010s-2020s, SpaceX achieved reusability in the launch vehicle industry and NASA moved away from cost-plus contracts, which together have begun to bend the cost curve of human spaceflight downwards.  

But it isn’t enough.  To truly make spaceflight accessible, we have to address costs across the entire engineering life cycle for vehicles, habitats, and missions.  We need to ensure that lessons learned in our industry inform the standards of tomorrow.  But we are in a learning period, and we do not yet have most of the answers we need to truly create safe standards.  

Human spaceflight is still both an art and a science.  Because of this, we need to have the right voices in the room from the beginning of the systems engineering process through to the project closeout.  This means more than engineers.  It means leveraging the expertise in other critical domains in more efficient and effective ways.  It means catching problematic design decisions before the cost of correcting them skyrockets.  This cannot be done if program managers decide that the hardware needs to be built before we consider the ‘other’ problems.  From the very beginning of the systems engineering life cycle, designers, physicians, life scientists, and others must be intimately involved in order to continue to bend the cost curve downwards.  

OSMED works to provide the insight, context, and expectation of interdisciplinary excellence to the rising workforce that supports the human spaceflight industry.  OSMED works to provide education, elevate critical and collaborative thinking, and support appropriate interpretation of scientific publications and evidence.  OSMED works to integrate risk and cost literacy in the workforce, introduce and develop interdisciplinary training, and elevate public awareness and knowledge.  OSMED works for the dream of human spaceflight. 

OSMED is creating a professional home for communication, cooperation, and coordination for experts across different domains that are key to the success of human spaceflight.

This includes:

• Investing in the education and mentorship of the next generation of experts building careers in human spaceflight.

• Providing pathways for current experts in a variety of fields to get the additional context and access they need to apply their skills to the developing industry, often in part-time positions.  OSMED believes that the recruitment and utilization of highly skilled experts should not be an all-or-nothing proposal for the industry.  There are many creative ways to get the benefits of high expertise without having to create and support a full-time position. 

• Creating a professional space that focuses on developing interdisciplinary exchange and insight for those already working in human spaceflight. 

In concrete terms, this means:

• Providing travel grants and scholarships to get promising students and researchers to conferences and events that they would not otherwise be able to attend due to cost limitations.  Our goal is to increase diverse representation in the human spaceflight industry.  

• Bringing together new entrants to the human spaceflight industry with seasoned veterans to help accelerate their career development through mentorship opportunities.

• Creating and supporting top-tier educational events and materials that meet learners where they currently are in their career journeys.

• Providing events like professional journal clubs to bring cross-disciplinary expertise together to critically evaluate the scientific literature, including from the perspective of risk and cost challenges.

• Supporting university and corporate efforts to create the certifications for the future workforce that address the needs of a rapidly changing industry. 

• Supporting start-up companies looking to address or expand into the human spaceflight marketplace by sharing lessons learned, best practices, and access to personnel with deep experience

In the broadest sense, medicine is the activity of keeping humans healthy.  In human spaceflight, this means working across all stages of the engineering and design life cycle to ensure that human health and performance are maintained in this environment to two ends:  First, to ensure that the humans that live and work in space can actually perform the jobs that they are sent there to do.  Second, to minimize the long-term health impacts that the spaceflight environment will have on them once they are done.  All too often, managers will underfund and underplan for the human needs in spaceflight.  It is too easy in a time of tough budgets to pretend that the one human factors engineer has an adequate understanding of human challenges in spaceflight. In exploration spaceflight to the moon and Mars, we understand well that extended exposure to the microgravity environment deconditions our astronauts.  Understanding that deconditioning process enables engineers and designers to consider the limitations human astronauts will face as we go farther from Earth and design for it.  In a developing LEO economy, we have little understanding of how most people who would not be selected as a NASA astronaut today will adjust to or cope with the spaceflight environment. Continuing to investigate physiologic changes in spaceflight, providing for medical prevention as well as acute medical care as we go through this learning process, and capturing as much data as possible will enable the engineers and designers of the future of human spaceflight to ensure that it is a safe industry.  Astronaut safety is the backbone of sustainability.  And we still have a lot to learn in this area. 

Understanding and solving the myriad technical challenges that human spaceflight presents is no small undertaking.  Engineers create the rockets that bring us to orbit, the moon, and beyond.  They create the vehicles, habitats, and life support systems that ensure human survival in the harsh environment of space.  Throughout the history of human spaceflight, engineers have played a central role.  They have demonstrated that which many have thought impossible again and again.  Because of this, they are also often in positions of management or administration, making key decisions about how to budget, where to spend, and who gets a seat at the table.  As we move beyond the era of government-sponsored spaceflight, engineers face tensions between budget realities and the problem-solving needs of a young industry.  This industry is responsible for moving away from the traditional model of ‘The Right Stuff’ where government astronauts are chosen for perfect health (in order to minimize mission risk) to a new model where the human spaceflight industry can expand access to space and create a large customer base to support an economy. This will not happen by applying the lessons of yesterday to the challenges of tomorrow.  Engineers, managers, and administrators need support in understanding which experts have appropriate insight into holistic human needs and can improve capability and decrease life-cycle costs.

The design of a vehicle, spacesuit, or mission is truly a conversation–not a monologue–that occurs across a wide variety of domains.  While engineers in the human spaceflight industry traditionally focus on solving daunting technical challenges, industrial and other designers work to expand the aperture beyond immediate problem-solving to the needs of sustainability.  This includes considerations of functionality, aesthetics, human factors, and more.  In the past era of government spaceflight, this was considered by many to be a luxury.  In the new era of commercial spaceflight, this is now a necessity.  In Low Earth Orbit, the goal of creating a sustainable economy requires building upon the successes of the past as well as envisioning the human needs of the future.  This also means considering early in the conceptual phases of vehicle, habitat, and space suit design how to make the right systems decisions early to reduce the exponential costs of correcting design mistakes later in the systems engineering life cycle.  Implementing true human systems integration for human spaceflight is the next frontier for life-cycle cost savings.