Art Students With the Right Stuff : NASA Official Praises Designs for Spaceship Components

A group of students in Pasadena has been staying up nights--sometimes all night--wrestling with the problem of how to make space travel easier and more productive for ordinary people.

Some of the proposals from the Art Center College of Design students seem likely to find their way aboard spaceships before the end of this century.

“Many of these (Art Center) projects are immediately applicable to our needs,” Malcolm Johnson, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration official from Houston, told the students at a recent review of their work.

Environmental Projects

“Some of you are actually working the problems better than some of our people are,” declared Johnson, a space station integration subsystem manager, noting that he plans to “spread some of (your) ideas to our people who are actually working on the problems.”

The students are in an environmental projects class at Art Center. In conjunction with NASA and the McDonnell Douglas Corp., they have designed aesthetically pleasing prototype space station components for laymen who will one day be orbiting through space, as opposed to the severe existing designs for previous astronauts, ultra-trained and hand-picked for their “right stuff.”

The components--such as living quarters and galleys--are designed for installation in cylinders 38.7 feet long and 13.8 feet in diameter that will serve as habitats in space stations designed to be spinning around the earth by 1994.

While the Art Center students have come up with some specific innovations, what seemed to impress Johnson the most was the overall aesthetic attractiveness of their designs.

Until now, aesthetics have rated a low priority for space vehicle design, if they have been a priority at all.

“They’ve always treated man as something that can be stuffed in anywhere,” observed Fred L. Toerge, referring to previous space vehicle designs. Toerge, a designer and an Art Center instructor who helped supervise the student space station project, noted that he was head of a team that “was hired to bring Skylab up to habitable standards” when he worked for industrial designer Raymond Loewy in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

NASA is not interested in aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake. It is interested in aesthetics for productivity’s sake.

Aesthetics and Productivity

“We have enough evidence that aesthetics are related to productivity in Earth environments,” said psychologist Trieve Tanner, acting assistant division chief of the Aerospace Human Factors Research Division at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, a NASA installation.

“There’s evidence that if a place is pleasant it affects your productivity positively, and if a place is unpleasant it affects productivity negatively. Also, there is evidence that aesthetics affect the general emotional and psychological health and, over the long run, that affects productivity,” Tanner observed.

One reason for the new interest in the aesthetics of space environments is the “new astronaut.”

Future space stations will house relatively ordinary folks: engineers, scientists and laymen charged with performing experiments and other duties without the benefit of the intense training required of earlier astronauts.

“It is extremely important to give these people the psychological and physical comforts that heretofore we have not really been concerned with for two reasons,” said Don Magargee, a McDonnell Douglas Corp. industrial designer who serves as liaison with the Art Center students.

Machine to Fit the Man

“In the first place we have had, as our astronauts, totally dedicated test pilots, and in the second place, because of the characteristics of people picked as astronauts, we have always before been able to have men fit the machine. Now we have to have the machine fit the men.”

An Art Center student proposal that indeed must fit men--and women--in space proved to be one of the least technical among those presented at the school, yet it appeared to impress NASA’s Johnson the most: good-looking, adjustable space clothing for both sexes.

Johnson called the student-designed clothing “a terrific project,” and noted that “we have contractors working on all these problems, but I haven’t seen anybody take it to this extent, addressing the psychological impact of variation and color in clothing.”

When astronauts spend three to six months in the cramped environment of a space station, the psychological impact of how they dress is likely to become a factor in their attitudes and, by extension, their productivity, Johnson observed. The cotton outfits pictured at Art Center represented not so much new suits of clothes as a new way of wearing clothes, explained the garments’ designer, Lama Khalaf, 22, a junior from Amman, Jordan.

By designing clothes in pleasant pastel colors, with detachable pant legs and shirt sleeves, Khalaf makes a single outfit suitable for day or evening wear, work or leisure.

Pulling a zipper here or a Velcro strip there makes trousers into shorts, long-sleeved shirts into short-sleeved or sleeveless shirts.

Allowing for Expansion

For cleanliness, there are disposable pads under the arms and behind the neck. Pockets detach. Removing a wide belt on the women’s outfit reveals a new color or delicate lace for evening wear.

Because in the zero gravity of space, astronauts tend to “grow” as much as seven-eighths of an inch, the outfits have zippers that allow them to expand as growth occurs.

The ability of one outfit to serve multiple purposes, and the fashionable design of the clothing, combine to save space that is at a premium in a space capsule, and to help establish the sense of pride and individuality traditionally expressed by a person’s clothes--but not expressed in today’s astronaut uniforms.

“This is very interesting stuff,” said designer John Frassanito, an adviser to the Art Center program, who reviewed the student work with Malcolm Johnson. “The whole concept of uniforms has to be rethought. This type of thinking is very . . . “

” . . . appropriate,” interjected Johnson, finishing Frassanito’s thought. “Her approach is excellent,” Johnson added.

Khalaf’s clothing was a surprise major success at the student presentation, particularly considering the more esoteric designs for such facilities as crew quarters and galleys on which teams of students had spent hundreds of hours.

A detailed mock-up of a crew stateroom, for example, featured a wall covered with 25 modules into which could be snapped homey items ranging from an aquarium or a growing plant to a retractable strap that acted as a hammock.

Custom-Designed Staterooms

An astronaut would bring from Earth personal modules to be inserted in the stateroom upon arrival in the space station. That way, explained senior Anthony Powell, 26, from Pasadena, each astronaut could custom-design his or her stateroom to suit personal needs and preferences.

It becomes possible to customize colors, lighting intensities and arrangements, storage space, sleeping configurations, video displays, desk positions and more, noted Powell.

Designer Toerge described the 80-inch high, 84-inch long, 57-inch deep stateroom as a “civilized space” that is especially important because it is the astronaut’s only private area in the space capsule.

“We are a civilized society,” Toerge observed, “And we can’t escape that. Not even in space.”

The student-designed galley was a particularly efficient unit. It had to be that way, explained Beth Santa, 28, an Art Center senior from Shelton, Conn., in order to efficiently prepare “appetizing, Earth-like meals in the zero gravity of space.”

Storage units at each end of the galley pull out at right angles to the wall, a door closes in front of the expanded volume, and the galley becomes totally enclosed--an important factor in weightless space where food particles will float throughout the capsule if not contained.

Rubberized Cuffs

Prepackaged food slips into microwave ovens and food processors. A fold-away hand-washing device has two rubberized cuffs through which astronauts thrust their hands to wash them without releasing water to float around the gravity free environment.

NASA’s Johnson zeroed in on the aesthetically pure hand washer, which folds out of sight, as a huge improvement over the existing model, which is an unsightly plexiglass dome that sticks out into otherwise useful space.

High Praise for Senior

Johnson also had high praise for the work of Geoff Fishman, a 39-year-old senior from South Pasadena, who proposed projecting abstract slides on the space capsule interior in order to provide a changing environment of color and depth perception.

Other student-designed items that drew particular praise from Johnson were a hygiene kit, organized to hold toilet items like soap, toothpaste and shampoo, and a tool kit with a proposed video screen programmed to display diagrams of various possible problem areas, so an astronaut could view “maps” of systems on which he might be working.

Unlike most student projects, there’s an excellent chance that the Art Center space components will find their way outside classroom doors.

“Some of these ideas may well be flying by the end of this century,” said Johnson. Then he paused, thought over what he’d said, and decided to make his statement more emphatic: “We will probably see some of these ideas flying before the year 2000.”