Image: NASA
This work is supported by the Evermay Future Fellowship.
The record of the human body in space is thinning
Sixty years of human spaceflight have produced knowledge no other field holds: how the body changes when gravity is removed, what keeps a crew healthy, and why systems that passed on paper failed in flight. Most of it was never written down in a form anyone else can use.
Fewer than 750 peoplehave left Earth in sixty-five years, and not one was measured continuously while they were up there.
One collectionThe station retires around 2030. It is the only continuous institutional record of bodies in space, and there is no successor.
Held in heads, not filesThe reasoning behind crew health standards sits with a few hundred practitioners. 4,000 civil servants left the agency in 2025 alone.
Figure 1. One mark for every person who has left Earth. None measured continuously.
No one is responsible for keeping it
Keeping a record like this takes longer than any single budget, administration or fund. Each actor is acting sensibly within its own horizon, and the work stops without anyone deciding to stop it.
Every horizon is shorter than the work
A center director’s tenure This work, prototype to flight Figure 2. Every actor is optimising correctly inside their own horizon. The work needs longer than all of them, which is why it stops without anyone deciding to stop it.
Agency capacity has contracted at the same time. NASA’s civil servant workforce is down 22% since 2025, 25 of 36 major projects report effects (GAO, 2026), and a further cut of more than 20% is proposed for FY2027. NASA centers compete for budgets, and no single center owns the transition from research to product, or the record of how it was done.
What it costs when the record is lost
Artemis. Practitioners were laid off, what they knew was not recorded, and work already solved once was done again.
TransHab, 1997–2000. NASA built the most advanced inflatable habitat of its era. Congress cancelled it in 2000. The patents were licensed out, and inflatables came back a decade later as commercial modules.
Constance Adams, 2017. The designer of TransHab asked 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.
Why the record matters
Processes that take decades on Earth run in months in orbit, which makes spaceflight the fastest available laboratory for aging, fluid dynamics and bone remodelling, and one of the least instrumented. Bone mineral density declines month to month, muscle and cardiovascular conditioning fall within weeks, and after sixty years the mechanisms behind most of these changes are still unresolved.
The same record serves people who never fly. Molecules behave differently in microgravity, and everything built for a sealed vehicle applies to any place people cannot step outside.
The Library of Human Spaceflight
The Library records practitioner knowledge while it is still first-hand and puts it back to work.
Record it while it is still first-hand. Structured conversations with the engineers, flight surgeons and designers who built and flew the systems being replaced.
Attach it to the hardware. Each account is tied to the system it concerns, so the next team finds it at the moment they need it rather than in an archive.
Put it back to work. The same people advise the teams maturing the replacements, so the transfer happens through practice.
What the Library holds
The Library is a proposal to hold this record in one place, to one standard, for the people who will need it next. It works alongside the institutions that already preserve the history of spaceflight, and treats the knowledge as a commons that belongs to the field as a whole.
Oral histories. Recorded conversations with people who worked on Skylab, Mir and ISS habitation systems, focused on the tradeoffs that never made it into published papers.
Practitioner archives. The working records of the architects, engineers and flight surgeons who built the field, many of which do not yet have an institutional home.
Design pattern archive. Recurring solutions to volume, stowage, privacy and crew workflow across every flown habitat.
The crew health record. One acquisition methodology across agency crews, commercial crews and ground analogs, so measurements form comparable curves rather than isolated timepoints. Normative ranges are published, and data is de-identified.
The precedent is a library, not a database
Held in trust. The Library of Congress exists because a record too valuable for any single owner still needs an owner.
Catalogued to one standard. A collection is only usable if everything in it was accessioned the same way.
Open to people who did not make it. The value compounds when researchers who never flew a mission can use the record.
If you built, qualified or flew crew systems, or you run a program that is about to lose that experience, we would like to talk: a@stellaramenities.space.
