Assessing the Number of Crew for Mars Against Trade Space Parameters

Missions to Mars will differ from all previous human spaceflight missions in that the onboard crew of astronauts will be required to operate in an Earth-independent manner given the long communication delays on Mars missions. Without a systematic, repeatable process to determine the number and composition of crew necessary to successfully accomplish these missions, NASA increases the risk in that crew sizes may be too small to meet primary mission objectives under nominal conditions and, more consequentially, the crewmembers may not have the expertise needed to successfully respond to unforeseen failures without the real-time expertise in the Mission Control Central (MCC) team on which NASA has come to rely.

We present a framework for trade space analysis along with results from human-performance models developed in IMPRINT. We discuss the implications of model results on the trade space for number of crew for missions to Mars.

This work was funded by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) with support from NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP).