Human-Factors-and-Work-in-Space

                       Human Factors and Work in Space
                                                                    by Dave Dietzler 2008

Much has been written about sustaining humans in space - radiation protection; oxygen, water and food supply, temperature control, dust control, preventing atrophy in prolonged weightlessness or low gravity through physical exercise, waste management, preserving psychological health by providing breaks and recreation, sleep, etc. Spacecraft to the Moon will dash through the Van Allen Belts at high speed to minimize radiation exposure time and a mere 12 cm thick shield of water or polyethylene surrounding the entire space capsule or just in the walls of a solar flare shelter to minimize shield mass can protect humans from solar flares. Oxygen can be regenerated from CO2 by chemical air purification systems. Dried food can be rehydrated with recycled water from condensed cabin air humidity and wastes. Electric heating and cooling units in spacecraft and space suits in addition to thermal insulation can control temperatures. On the Moon, sand bags full of regolith or just piles of regolith on partially buried habitat modules can provide thermal and radiation protection. Dust can be controlled with wash down systems in airlocks that use jets of air or electrostatic dust removal systems to clean dust off spacesuits and habitat air will be circulated and filtered to remove dust. Space workers might wear fliter masks whenever anyone returns from out on the lunar surface until any dust brought in is filtered out of the air by the powerful ventilation system. Many of the challenges of human survival in space have been defeated by experience aboard American and Russian spacecraft and space stations like Skylab, the Salyut and Mir, and now the ISS.

On the Moon at a growing industrial base there will be many jobs to do that cannot be done by robots teleoperated by workers on the Moon and/or Earthside ground controllers. Will the workers be "jacks-of-all-trades" trained to do a multiplicity of tasks or will they be like union workers who each specialize in welding, electricity, pipe fitting, masonry, driving, grunt work, sheet metal, etc.? There probably won't be any carpenters. Will there be a full time medical staff or will the workers be trained to give shots and draw blood and do simple medical tests while doctors on Earth do the actual diagnosing and prescribe medicines from the Moon base's pharmacopia? I doubt that we will need office managers on the Moon. Cutting paychecks and accounting will all be handled back on Earth. Workers won’t be paying for room and board either. They will have access to the galley and cook whatever they want at the Moon base. They will be selected partially for their maturity and sense of responsibility so I don't think they will raid the galley, waste food, or steal morphine from the medicine lockers. Alcohol will not be supplied except for a very small amount for holiday celebrations. Tobacco smoking will not be permissible in the pressurized cabins of spacecraft or lunar habitat. So there doesn't need to be a full time cooking staff or bartenders. Janitorial tasks will require that everyone pitches in. They will do their own laundry. The Moon base will be more like a home and the workers more like a family rather than a town or city. This is not to say that towns and cities won't emerge on the Moon someday with everything from supermarkets to banks and large numbers of people who can only do one or two jobs as is the norm in today’s modern urban setting. There could be some specialization in early Moon bases with anywhere from 4 to 50 workers, as there is on a ship. Some will be officers and others will be sailors. They will each handle a set of tasks for instance welding, electricity and sheet metal work while another handles masonry, tile setting, ceramic brazing and cement work. Even the commander will do some work on the Moon, especially when there are only four men or women at an early base. They will all have to know how to pilot the spacecraft and do maintenance and repair work on the spacecraft, habitat systems, robots and other equipment like wheeled rovers. They will be expert at the use of computers and at least be software and hardware technicians if not computer engineers in addition to their other skills. They will have to know how to get around in spacesuits and maintain and repair those also.

These early Moon base workers will not need to be geologists and chemists but they will need to know a little about these subjects and know how to do some simple lab work like slicing up unusal rocks and core samples with electric hack saws and taking digital photographs of the rock slices/core samples through microscopes for geologists back at corporate research headquarters to study by way of high resolution digital TV transmissions. They will know how to do some simple chemical tests in the lab also. This will all be highly secretive because valuable discoveries might be made and the company won’t want anybody to “jump their claim.”   Besides constructing a base capable of growing along the S-shaped curve (also known as the learning curve) the workers will go on exploratory forays. If they are anything like the typical adventurer who likes to go caving, diving, boating, parachuting and/or mountain climbing they will consider these prospecting forays to be recreational outings, so I think they will be willing to do plenty of exploring. Will they be priestly characters or must we send husband/wife teams to the Moon? I tend to favor the husband/wife team model and if only four of them are up there to start we should send two couples.

They might not need much for recreation besides computers for reading books stored in their lap top solid state hard drives as well as radio internet links for web surfing and downloading books from the company’s Earthside computers, although the internet in coming decades will make millions of books available. In addition to reading our highly skilled lunar workers could use a deck of cards and some plastic chips, some dice, some soda and potato chips, and the galley/mess cabin table. Carbonation for soda could come from CO2 in cabin air, and upported cola syrup, recycled water, a soda making machine and sturdy cans of Pringles would make for refreshments on poker night. They will also have access to TV and radio webcasts, news, sports and weather. They will have videogames too and play chess on computers if they are so inclined. They could have potted plants to decorate their cabins with and perhaps a small fish bowl if they want pets that might not be very furry but are easy to take care of and add color to the habitat interior. They might find unusual colorful rocks on the Moon to decorate with also, although unusual rocks will be candidates for lab analysis.

Their work will consist largely of robot teleoperation with joysticks and 3D goggles for finer tasks that cannot be done by Earthside operators due to the 3 second round trip time for radio waves (digital signals) to travel from Earth to Moon and back. As for jobs so fine that even robots teleoperated by workers in lunar habitat can’t be done, these will require going outside in spacesuits with a complete set of tools. They will use the buddy system out on the lunar surface and workers back in the habitat will suit up partially in case two or three people are needed for a rescue operation. While one works another will assist and even record the work with a digital TV camera and whatever exists beyond Blue-Ray DVD burners in the future (probably everything will be recorded on solid state hard drives) so they can re-examine what was done to figure out where they went wrong if a maintenance or repair job didn’t work out. They will take lots of still pictures too during exploratory forays. Besides human forays wheeled robots will be out prospecting under control by Earthside ground crews.

Some jobs will be done inside. The habitat will have a machine shop where human workers cut small screws on bench top lathes and such. They will use small machine tools to finish small parts made by computer guided laser or electron beam 3D additive sintering machines out in the vacuum. Then they will assemble the small parts packages and modules and either let a robot install them on a large part like a vehicle frame made out on the Moon by just plugging in the module or go outside and do it themselves. When every pound costs about $10,000 to send to the Moon making parts and small modular parts assemblies on the Moon from lunar materials will be worth the trouble. It won’t be too hard to teleoperate a robot that digs up some regolith and dumps it in a furnace that then produces some metal, take the metal ingots while still hot and load them in an extruder to make some wheeled vehicle or robot frame parts, then weld the frame up with a teleoperated robot, but doing some of the wiring for the vehicle might require human hands. It should be possible to teleoperate a robot that drills some holes and bolts down a control or camera module, but will the robot with a magnifying camera for the workers that operate it be able to plug in the leads to the module that a human installed on the frame? I think so. It might be easier and faster for a human after wiring up some cable bundles to just drill the holes, bolt in the module and plug in the leads rather than bother with the robot!

Robots might be used mostly to just go out and dig up wide areas of regolith and put it through onboard magnetic separators to get iron fines or load it into an onboard furnace to roast out solar wind implanted volatiles. If the mining robots have enough intelligence to avoid running into a boulder they could operate without much supervision. Teleoperated or preprogrammed robots shouldn’t have much trouble loading a furnace that roasts anorthositic highland regolith to cement powder, draining out the cement and mixing it with sieved and sized regolith that will serve as fine aggregate and some gravel obtained when mining also, then loading this dry concrete mix into a tank and closing the lid. Water would then be pumped into the tank and agitators in the tank would mix up the concrete that would then be forced under gas pressure through a hose into an inflatable fabric module with hose fittings to make a concrete floor. Once the concrete floor hardens humans could enter through the airlock of the inflatable, install dehumidifiers if they weren’t already part of the inflatable module and recapture some water vapor as wet cement is about 10% water but when it dries is only about 2% water. With a concrete floor, something that would certainly be too heavy and therefore to costly to upport, it will be possible to melt metals and ladle them into molds without any danger of spilling them and melting thru a thin aluminum or Kevlar hull. So casting parts can begin. There could be salt pots in the concrete floored inflatable and water filled tubs for heating and quenching steel parts. Teleoperated robots could probably handle that too.

To make work on the lunar surface easier for humans and robots, the habitat would be assembled in LEO at a space station and landed intact. Inflatable work modules could also be assembled in LEO and landed in one piece. These configurations would be propelled from LEO to LLO by electric drives. The work modules would have to come in contact with the lunar surface if we are going to pump wet concrete into them for molten metal proof floors. That won’t require any extreme designs as I envision it. Three inflatables would be connected in a triangular configuration with composite trusses and the landing rocket or retro rocket if you prefer would be located in the center of the balanced configuration. The retro’s tanks would be made of thin aluminum with vertical ridges milled in them, wound with Kevlar or carbon fiber and coated with polyurethane spray on insulation and a coating of reflective paint. They would use space storable MMH and N2O4 or H2O2. The rocket motor would be pump fed and gimbaled. Upon nearing about ten or twenty feet above the lunar surface the rocket will cut out and explosive bolts will disconnect it. The inflatables and rocket will fall slowly together and the inflatables filled with air or just nitrogen will bounce while the rocket just goes crunch when it lands on its highly expanded space nozzle. A crane landed earlier will lift out the spent rocket and it will be cut up and melted down in solar or electric furnaces to obtain aluminum, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and some steel.

If the work modules are just filled with 2 or 3 psi nitrogen human workers will wear spacesuits inside. Once the concrete floors are pumped in they can drill into the floor and mount machine tools, install molten salt pots for heat treating metals, water tubs for quenching metals, small electric furnaces for melting metals, a sand molding table and other pieces of equipment like work tables and fixtures for mounting work pieces and electric metal arc welders. Robotic cranes with shovel attachments will cover the inflatable work chambers with regolith for thermal, radiation and micrometeoroid protection. Internal illumination will come from LEDs with very long lifetimes and low power demand. At the hubs of the inflatable work modules there will be hard shelled units containing fans and cleanable dust filters, batteries, power outlets, dehumidifiers to condense water from dried concrete and water that vaporizes when quenching hot metals, heating and cooling units, and lights.

In addition to being spacecraft pilots, robot teleoperators, computer techs, and more, the workers will also have to be skilled machinists and welders. Space workers are going to need a lot of training. They will be so valuable that they will command high pay. After several months on the Moon they will return to Earth and probably go back to the Moon a few years later to do another stint. The second time around they will be experienced and more efficient and therefore be worth paying even better money than they received on their first stint. During their years between stints on the Moon they could train new workers and be paid for that too. They could design equipment that is easier to work with and new procedures based on their actual experience on the Moon. They could advise first timers on the Moon by radio when they encounter problems. They could also write books about their experiences on the Moon, give lectures and make TV appearances. There’s going to be a lot of money for them and a lot of competition to get those positions as space workers. They might not be “jacks-of-all-trades” but they will be close. They will have to be very healthy too.

When I think about people I know who can fly small planes, take computers apart and put them back together, scuba dive, hunt and fish, cook, clean, do engineering, photography, fix their own cars, work on their houses, weld, use machine tools, keep themselves occupied when there is no work to do by reading, websurfing, playing chess on a computer or solitaire, socialize smoothly with people of diverse religious and political convictions, and use scientific instruments, I have no doubt that we can find space workers of the caliber and intelligence needed to work on the Moon and get a bootstrapping base to grow rapidly to a large mining and factory town that can supply the millions of tons of materials and finished products needed to build swarms of helium 3 mining robot tractors, mass drivers to launch materials into space for building power relay satellites, solar power satellites and even robotic asteroid mining spacecraft that can also deflect asteroids on collision course with Earth to prevent mass extinction of the human race and many other lifeforms on Earth. Finally, the lunar mining and factory town(s) will supply raw materials and finished products for building fleets of colony ships to Mars for a gigantic terraforming project. We will even see the emergence of space colonies like those envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill and others.