Three Space Architectures
Images: ISS interior; Airbus A-Loop; CloudsAO Mars Hydrosphere
In my mind there are something like 3 types of space architecture, the nomenclature for which I’m making up on the fly, and I’m generally a fan of all three given the right context.
Type 1 is effectively what the inside of the ISS looks like today. Everything is flight qualified or has flight heritage. There is a familiar, if haphazard picture of the interior, which some have described as the inside of a VCR. In some future-focused design work, there may be slight variations or improvements, but these are generally only quantitative changes — more of something good, less of something bad, but nothing substantively different.
Type 2 is speculative and conceptual with little or no attempt to rationalize how things will work or get built. The imagery is fantastical and imaginative and the vision for the future could be anywhere from 50 to 500 years away. But it almost doesn’t matter because it’s not intended to be a roadmap, but instead to provoke.
Type 3 is somewhere in between -- no, they're not in order. Not content with making iterative improvements over what’s already being done but also unwilling to disregard a practical roadmap for achieving the design ideas. This represents a qualitative change from what’s been done before, the creative destruction that fuels innovation. It also sits on a foundation of technical understanding of what makes existing capabilities successful.
Each of these has a slightly different purpose in mind, depending on the intended stakeholders and audience. I like the practicality and rigor inherent in Type 1 just as much as I like the creative concepts of Type 2. But the third type is where I like to practice. The ideas are feasible, but noticeably different from what’s currently flying or planned to be. The engineering is possible and solvable, though maybe not quite solved yet. Concepts can be reasonably posed as problem statements to motivate solutions. The timeframe for implementation might not be in the next year but is preferably within my working life. I want to challenge the existing norms while staying practical enough to actually put things into space. We need all three types to develop the field, but for me this third type is the sweet spot for practicing space architecture.
