| dc.description.abstract | As the scope of human spaceflight continues to expand, the Human Systems Integration (HSI) developed to support complex missions must be robust and efficient. This risk has been outlined in the Human Research Roadmap (HRR) as the “Risk of Adverse Outcomes Due to Inadequate Human Systems Integration Architecture” [1], short name HSIA. One of the most critical elements of any human spaceflight mission is training, which prepares flight operations teams with the resources necessary to carry out that mission. As more distant destinations such as the Moon or Mars are targeted for human spaceflight, ensuring crew have the tools they need to overcome new types of challenges will be a significant focus when developing new training infrastructures. With the nature of such missions, there are several knowledge gaps associated with HSIA that motivate investigating how training should be carried out on such missions.
This research focuses on studying these gaps and using the findings to create a conceptual demonstration for a tool that can be used to assist in the training infrastructure that supports future spaceflight missions. This tool is called the Simulation Builder, Analysis, and Development (SimBAD) tool, which is a User Interface (UI) that utilizes the Space Collaborative Real-time Analysis and Flight Toolkit to build virtual training environments. There are four main objectives that incentivize the development of this tool, the improved collaboration between groups in the flight operations team, a training framework that is capable of being packaged on board a spacecraft, a framework that accounts for dynamic mission parameters, and a heightened level of autonomy for crew on missions. These objectives have been driven by the findings from an examination of current spaceflight training methods, previous research on training for future missions, and elements of the HSIA risk that pertain to training.
The SimBADtool was designed with features that were motivated by these objectives to effectively create a virtual training facility. These features allow the user to control the environments, systems, procedures, events, and evaluations that are constructed together inside a virtual simulation. Giving this control to users as well as access to the environment through Virtual Reality (VR) is the overall method through which this thesis argues the objectives of the concept are met. These objectives are determined to be met and results for analysis are created through a demonstration of the concept. For this research the demonstration is done through several scenarios that are constructed in simulations using the SimBAD tool. The first is a simulation of IntraVehicular Activities (IVA) procedures being executed on board the International Space Station (ISS) which demonstrates the tool is able to account for dynamic mission parameters; the second is a simulation of two users inside a Mars habitat performing a comms check procedure that demonstrates capability for improved collaboration between groups on the flight operations team. The UI and VR platform demonstrate the tool is capable of packaging on board a spacecraft as well as increasing the autonomy the crew has during their mission. The elements of SimBAD establish a closed-loop infrastructure as a virtual training facility that offers improvements towards human spaceflight in HSI, particularly for future exploration missions by offering functionality towards the construction of simulated scenarios with procedure capability, dynamic event scripting, and simulation evaluation. | |
