Abstract
Space is the final frontier. It is the ultimate challenge for human exploration. With lofty goals of expanding our understanding of and reach in the universe, space exploration has captivated the adventurous hearts of scientists and engineers since the beginning of the Space Race in the 1950s. However, the world of spaceflight is fraught with danger. Sending astronauts into space is a risky endeavor. Spacecraft are complex systems filled with sensitive and volatile technologies. When a manned spacecraft fails, lives are lost. In order for crewed space exploration missions to take place, NASA must earn the trust of the public to get its astronauts home safely. But what happens when a mission goes wrong, and that trust is broken? As NASA prepares for future crewed missions to the Moon and beyond, the agency faces a dual challenge: designing technologies that can reliably transport astronauts through the treacherous environment of space, and maintaining the public support required to sustain future space exploration. The technical portion investigates how a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) can be engineered to safely return astronauts from the Martian surface to enable future manned missions to Mars. The STS portion examines how NASA responds when its spaceflight missions end in disaster, analyzing how the agency works to repair both its sociotechnical infrastructure and its relationship with the public after spaceflight disasters.
The technical component of this portfolio investigates a Mars Ascent Vehicle designed to lift astronauts off the surface of Mars. Compared to the Moon, which we have successfully landed on many times in the past, the greater distance, atmospheric air resistance, and gravity make missions to Mars much more difficult. With fuel as a major limiting factor, the existing Mars mission architecture from NASA recommends the use of a MAV that is capable of
rendezvousing and docking with a separate Earth return vehicle to overcome these challenges. This project focuses on the mechanical and systems-level design of the MAV, culminating in CAD models of the structural components of the MAV. Due to our limitations as a capstone group, other subsystems were deemed to be outside the scope of this project. Methods include analysis of NASA documentation, trade studies of subsystem components, and evaluation of structural integrity using finite element analysis. Results from these analyses informed the design of an ascent vehicle capable of maintaining structural integrity while maximizing allotted volume, as well as design adaptations to support a multi-stage ascent maneuver. The resulting product is far from a functional spacecraft, and more work is needed to design a reliable MAV capable of enabling future crewed missions to Mars.
The STS research component examines how NASA responds to major spaceflight disasters and how these responses influence both internal sociotechnical systems and public trust. Framed by the question of how institutions recover from catastrophic infrastructural failure, this project analyzes the Challenger and Columbia disasters to evaluate the mutual shaping within NASA’s responses. Evidence from official investigation reports and documentation of the changes to the Space Shuttle Program shows that, in the aftermath of each disaster, NASA implemented significant reforms, including improving engineering review processes and creating a culture of safety with the sociotechnical infrastructure to support it. Drawing on concepts from sociotechnical repair theory, the analysis argues that these disasters, caused by a combination of technical malfunctions and a deviant organizational culture, could only be fixed using deeply intertwined social and technical repairs. However, this infrastructural repair generally went unseen by the public. Instead, the Challenger and Columbia tragedies appealed to the American public’s patriotism and optimism, raising support for the space program and confidence in NASA’s capabilities. This project concludes that NASA overcame the infrastructural breakdowns of Challenger and Columbia through effective utilization of sociotechnical repair.
