Evaluating the impact of mission architecture on crew dynamics in space exploration

Designs for large-scale missions to Mars are becoming feasible with the advent of high-capacity launch vehicles. Larger crew sizes necessitate pre-mission testing to evaluate the impact of mission architecture on crew well-being. Two analog missions were conducted, one in a standard 6-person crew and another with 11 crew split into a dual-site architecture. Daily questionnaires were administered and compared to each participant's pre-mission baseline scores to measure the impact of an increase in multi-layered identities, created through the larger mission's multi-team structure. Results indicate that mission architecture influences the crew's socioemotional health over the course of a space mission, with changes recorded in 7 of the characteristics measured by the questionnaire. Additionally, analog involvement in general is shown to have positive impacts on 18 of the characteristics, across both missions. This study constitutes a feasibility test of the impacts of distributed space mission architectures on crew health and performance. Future iterations of this work enable testing of additional mission architectures, which will inform architecture selection for crew health and performance in future Mars missions.