Journal of Space Safety Engineering 5 (2018) 9–13 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Space Safety Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jsse Human-centered design of upcoming human missions to Mars Guy André Boy 1 Air and Space Academy, Ancien observatoire de Jolimont - 31500 Toulouse - France a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 16 November 2017 Revised 20 December 2017 Accepted 3 January 2018 a b s t r a c t Human missions to Mars are not only a matter of technology-centered engineering, it is foremost a mat- ter of human-centered design (HCD) where technology, organizations and people roles should be co- designed in a participatory and agile way. Major human-centered components are trajectory and propul- sion (defining HCD in terms of time), life-support (physiological, psychological and social factors), ex- ploration (jobs during flights and on the planet) and anticipation of a Martian civilization (governance, natural and artificial resource management). I will review a few experiments that were conducted so far, such as Mars-500, MDRS and what we are doing in HCD, such as key cognitive and social concepts of operations that rely on situation awareness and decision-making, complexity analysis, dealing with the unexpected, automation and autonomy, and collaborative work. I will develop the perspective that human-systems integration (HSI) is a matter of integrating HCD and systems engineering. We then need to orchestrate the design of the various structures and functions involved in human Mars operations. This orchestration can be made using modeling and human-in-the-loop simulations looking for emerging cognitive and physical functions towards the definition of underlying cyber-physical systems. HSI can be managed in terms of design flexibility, resource commitments, and human-systems knowledge. © 2018 International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction For the last 40 years or so, I worked on cockpit analysis, design and evaluation. Today, we talk about “interactive cockpit”, that is people in charge interact with computers that interact with other things (e.g., physical entities such as engines and wings, as well as cognitive entities such as ground control and crews). This paper addresses the difficult question of function allocation among people and systems in the scope of future human missions to Mars. Before providing solutions, it is crucial to focus on stating the overall problem correctly. Problem stating is a matter of cre- ativity. Creativity will be defined as integration. As a metaphor, a painter who wants to create a new color, a kind of orange for ex- ample, mixes red and yellow. He or she incrementally integrates red and yellow until a satisfactory orange comes up. Dealing with technology, the same schema applies. A new technology is basically an integration of several components that already exist, or have to be designed (i.e., being themselves integration of components). E-mail address: guy.andre.boy@gmail.com 1 He was Dean and University Professor at the School of Human-Centered De- sign, Innovation and Art, Florida Institute of Technology, USA, and Chief Scientist for Human-Centered Design at NASA Kennedy Space Center. He is the Chair of the Human-Systems Integration Working Group at the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and Fellow of the Air and Space Academy. Integration is key and a recursive process. Now, components can be technological or human. This is why human-systems integration (HSI) emerges as a fundamental goal in design. Such design will be denoted human-centered design (HCD). For that matter, HCD of upcoming human missions to Mars re- quires creativity and design thinking, involving various kinds of ex- pertise and experience owned by aerospace engineers, computer scientists, astronauts and ground operators, for example. On May 30–31, 2017, I participated in a Mars Social Sciences Workshop at NASA Kennedy Space Center, where we addressed and discussed a set of key research questions such as technology, time, envi- ronment, number of colonists, simulation, highest priority prob- lems and showstoppers, Earth-crew connectivity, budget and gov- ernment decisions, task allocation, privacy, technology lifecycle and HSI [6]. We also addressed and discussed methods and approaches for the design of support systems such as analogs (e.g., Mars 500), not only artificial reality, and actual scenarios, going to the Moon before Mars, look at the government, industries and transportation, and life support systems (e.g., how do we produce the food) in such an extreme environment. One of the recommendations was to test prototypes at different levels that lead to Human Missions to Mars, and use analogs and simulations both virtual and physical. Challenges and barriers are expected to be the following (a short summary of results from the workshop). The first question is: Why is going to Mars important? People on earth need to be https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsse.2018.01.001 2468-8967/© 2018 International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.