A Novel Information Management Architecture for Maintaining LongDuration Space Crews

A key factor limiting long-duration space flight is the inability to maintain the crew effectively in weightlessness. Current approaches to crew preservation involve discrete experiments to measure physiologic adaptation and post flight evaluations to assess the effectiveness of countermeasures. As the length and complexity of missions increase, these approaches will be inadequate. A revolutionary new approach is needed, where crewmembers have automated, continuous, unobtrusive, and accurate monitoring of their physiology so they can maintain themselves in space. Suitable future crew maintenance systems will require complex, automated information retrieval, monitoring, and analysis. These systems will also need to be robust and flexible enough to operate in the distributed, information intensive, bandwidth limited environment characteristic of space flight. Creating such systems will be a major challenge for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).