CHARACTERIZATION AND EVALUATION OF MANNED SPACECRAFT OPERABILITY FACTORS

摘要

As humans increase their presence in space, whether for routine missions to the ISS or to extraterrestrial bodies, itis important to understand how the human element may affect safety and mission success. Often captured as humanperformance, the human element is hard to quantify. Therefore, determining whether a spacecraft design enhances orreduces human performance is difficult to verify. Evidence of the difficulty of designing human systems is seen bythe number of accidents caused by human error even in some of the most developed industries like aviation andmaritime. The goal of this paper is to define and characterize the factors that influence human performance. Threemain categories that affect human performance are spacecraft design, mission operations, and human physiology.While NASA's Human Integration Design Handbook (HIDH) provides general design guidelines for accommodatinghumans in spacecraft design, the integrated impact to operations and human performance is not well-understood. Toimprove this understanding, each of these factors were identified and evaluated to determine their relative influenceon human performance. For example, during high intense workload situations, tasks requiring verbalcommunications may be dropped in favour of visual tasks. A list of possible factors and their influences is capturedwithin this work. An operability index was then created by aggregating these values and their weighted influences.This index captures the relationship between spacecraft design and human performance. The index is intended tohelp future spacecraft engineers identify designs that promote optimal performance, which can lead to increasedsafety and mission success. Additionally, it provides a way for engineers to quantify changes to operability acrossdifferent design iterations. Future work will focus on the verification of this operability index and its application tohistorical spacecraft to ensure its applicability and robustness.