At the start of this year, the European Space Agency’s Lunar I-Hab program made relevant progress at Thales Alenia Space’s Turin facility with the completion of the Acceptance Review of the mockup supplied by Liquifer Space Systems, thanks to the fine efforts of all concerned.
This milestone marks a step toward establishing a human presence inside the future European outpost in lunar orbit. The mockup is a full-scale replica of the actual flight module, incorporating a structure representing the habitable volume complemented by a cabin outfitted with volumetric models of actual flight equipment.
© Thales Alenia Space
Thales Alenia Space, as Lunar I-Hab prime contractor, is responsible for overall program management, system engineering, definition of the functional architecture, configuration, layout and implementation of ergonomic aspects of human factors, thermal and mechanical systems, production of the primary structure, and the hatches of the docking ports. The company is also responsible for assembly, integration and testing (AIT) in line with ESA’s mission objectives and NASA’s Gateway requirements. The Lunar I-Hab mockup is thus a crucial resource, enabling the team to conduct extensive test scenarios that will play a pivotal role in guiding design activities and ensuring the system’s efficacy.
The mockup will integrate two cabin-outfitting configurations for the Human-In-the-Loop (HITL) campaign, employing increasingly sophisticated low- and medium-fidelity models.
© Thales Alenia Space
The ready-to-use mockup will facilitate the HITL test campaign, scheduled alongside the project’s Design and Development phase. To guarantee seamless test execution, the low-fidelity model has been equipped with volumetric representations of cabin items, movable pallets, hatches and several devices to assist users during testing, the first of a series of outfits mirroring the current Lunar I-Hab design and planned for use before System CDR. Subsequent verification will progress to medium-fidelity outfitting, incorporating more detailed representations and functional crew interfaces. The final verification phase occurs at the high-fidelity level within the Lunar I-Hab module itself.
Notably, it will include special mechanisms designed to relieve the load of heavy equipment, mimicking the absence of gravity experienced by astronauts during orbital operations. Furthermore, it features springboards to aid correct motions inside the cabin.
The interactive human tasks involved in these tests serve to uncover potential design and integration bottlenecks, helping Thales Alenia Space’s team not only to tease out opportunities for refinement, but also to evaluate design synergies with human operations and ensure a successful path to verification.
HITL tests are based on a human-centric approach with test subjects representing actual users, including crew members from NASA and ESA. These participants simulate on-orbit tasks with flight-representative hardware, thereby offering a robust demonstration of the functional concept and design in terms of efficiency, safety, effectiveness, and acceptability against system requirements.
© Thales Alenia Space
Thales Alenia Space is committed to ensuring a stable presence in human space exploration, actively contributing to the development of increasingly comfortable and secure space infrastructure. For NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to take astronauts back to the Moon in the next few years, the company is supplying in partnership with Airbus Defense and Space the backbone of the European Service Module (ESM) for the Orion spacecraft. In addition to the Lunar I-Hab module, the company’s involvement in Lunar Gateway extends to critical components such as HALO, manufactured in partnership with Northrop Grumman for NASA, which will be the first habitation and logistics module of the Gateway cislunar space station. Furthermore, the company is also responsible for ESA’s Lunar View and Lunar Link, which provide the station with enhanced communications, refueling capability, and an additional pressurized environment, marking a historic achievement in industrial solutions for lunar exploration and beyond.