Investigating the Role of Mission Architecture in Crew Socioemotional Health for Mars Exploration

Abstract

Human space exploration is evolving rapidly, with commercial successes and NASA’s Artemis missions driving rapid growth and innovation. Plans for longer, larger, and more complex missions necessitate development of new mission architectures to sustain the crews needed to support these missions. Larger missions and multi-site architectures have become feasible with advances in commercial launch vehicles, and generate increased safety and redundancy for crewed operations. However, crew dynamics in these mission architectures have yet to be investigated. This thesis investigates the role of mission architecture (specifically single-site versus dual-site configurations) in subgroup formation and the resulting impacts to socioemotional well-being. We first develop a systematic approach for optimizing analog mission design, then apply this to design two analog missions to compare the effects of single-site and dual-site mission architectures on crew dynamics and psychosocial health. Results provide valuable insights for future Mars mission design, where crew structure and psychosocial adaptation are critical to mission success.