Keeping sixty years of knowledge alive
For sixty years, institutions like the Smithsonian have carefully preserved the history of human spaceflight, and that work continues today. But as spaceflight shifts from a handful of agencies to a broad field of commercial and international actors, who preserves and carries that knowledge forward is no longer settled. This is a parallel effort suited to that new landscape: commercial and emerging space actors preserving and transferring knowledge alongside the institutions, the Smithsonian, Cal Academy of Sciences, the de Young, already doing this well. We treat this knowledge as a civilizational commons. Something that belongs to the field as a whole and requires formal stewardship, not something any one company can quietly let lapse.
In 2017, Constance Adams, designer of NASA's TransHab habitat and one of the field's founding voices, sent a personal note asking for help preserving her records before she passed. Her archive went to Yale. There was no home built for a space architect's life's work, and that gap is what this initiative exists to close.
The Library begins with the archive of NASA space architect Kriss Kennedy. Decades of habitat design work that, unlike Constance's, doesn't yet have an institutional home. It's the first of what we expect to be many archives from a generation of space architects now leaving the field.
Running alongside the archive is a frontier lab in human spaceflight, developing technologies that tend to stall in the gap between research and deployment. It's the living example of how this knowledge stays alive: by being used, not just stored.
Recorded conversations with people who worked on Skylab, Mir, and ISS habitation systems, focused on the tradeoffs that never made it into published papers.
Cataloging recurring solutions to volume, stowage, privacy, and crew workflow problems across every flown habitat, so future designers aren't starting from zero.
Structured data on habitat volumes, crew sizes, mission durations, and outcomes, released for other researchers to build on.
If you worked on a flown or proposed habitat and want your knowledge recorded, we'd like to talk to you.