| Summary: | A space habitat is responsible for maintaining the health and comfort of the crew during nominal and off-nominal situations so that they are able to carry out the scientific duties of their mission. With the Artemis program, NASA is planning to construct a space habitat in the moon's orbit and a surface habitat near the lunar south pole. As space habitats become more complex and are located farther from Earth, there are increased challenges to ensure resilience in system performance and crew safety. Disturbances that occurred on the International Space Station (ISS), such as reduced efficiency of the urine processor assembly and atmospheric leaks, may pose greater risks to the crew when the habitats are located farther than LEO. By incorporating resilience-based engineering into the design process, habitat designs can be analyzed based on their ability to keep the crew safe even in the event of unplanned disturbances. Resilience-based engineering calls for the habitat to be able to monitor its performance, anticipate future demands and challenges, respond to any disturbances, and learn from experience. Increasing the system resilience of a space habitat can come from the design of the habitat layout and configuration as well as from advanced resource management strategies. The environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) is able to distribute, recycle, and produce various resources integral to the habitat's functions. On the ISS, ECLSS subsystems are statically set to operate at a prescribed level by engineers at mission control on Earth. As space habitats move beyond low Earth orbit, a number of factors contribute to making this approach less desirable in the case of a disturbance. Farther distances increase the communication time delay, resupply times, and cost of redundancy. Longer-term surface habitats will also become more complex, increasing the number of components that could fail, the risk of cascading failures, and the number of factors to take into account when determining how to reallocate ...
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