Redesigning Salyut for research and tourism

Overview

A design study reimagining the cramped, equipment-first interior of a Salyut-class station as a genuinely habitable environment, applying contemporary space-architecture principles to a historic platform.

Originally built by the Soviet Union for reconnaissance in the 1970s, the station now carries the name Almaz and belongs to the private company Excalibur Almaz. With the ISS approaching the end of its life, the study asked what a reusable commercial station could be if it served two very different groups at once: researchers and tourists, up to six people in a fixed, unchangeable volume.

The platform

Excalibur Almaz was formed in 2005 to adapt proven Russian space technology for private spaceflight. By the time of the study it owned four reusable reentry vehicles and two Salyut-class station pressure vessels, all held at its facility on the Isle of Man, with more than $45 million invested in the program.

The hardware had flown. The company’s own program summary records nine successful entries and soft landings, one vehicle flown three times and another twice, and one operational flight that spent 175 days attached to a Salyut station. The manufacturer estimated each vehicle could be reused up to fifteen times.

That history set the terms of the study. The pressure vessel and its structure were fixed; what could change was everything the crew touches.

Approach

We re-examined circulation, orientation, storage and private space, treating the crew’s daily lived experience, not the equipment layout, as the design driver. The geometry of the original station was fixed, so a series of volume studies was used to find where the space was failing and where it could be won back.

Drawing on environmental psychology, the interior uses evidence-based biophilic design to support mental health and wellbeing, and therefore crew performance. Deployable and multipurpose surfaces let the same volume change character through the day, which also breaks the monotony of living inside a small cylinder.

For tourists, a later phase adds an attached inflatable module of the kind flown as BEAM, used as a projection volume for augmented and virtual environments: a luxury experience that does not cost the research station any of its working space.

Outcome

A concept showing how much habitability improves when human-centered design leads the interior, and how far a proven, already-built pressure vessel can be taken for two opposing user groups without changing the structure around it.

The work was presented as Redesign of Salyut Station for Dual-Use of Research and Tourism at the 70th International Astronautical Congress in 2019, in the IAA Symposium on Space and Society, with Tamalee Basu and Ayda Uraz of the University of Houston.

Designing for two users

The team examined the demographics, goals, behaviors and challenges of each user group. Tourists want to be immersed in a one-of-a-kind experience, with a crew attendant operating the station and acting as host. Research missions want efficiency and multi-use of the same volume, across pharmaceuticals, technology development, Earth and space science, physical sciences, biotechnology and materials manufacturing.

The concept of operations alternates between the two, with unmanned research running in the background. Tourist missions last about two weeks, followed by one to two days of automated maintenance, then three to four weeks of crewed research that companies and agencies rent the station for.

Volume decided the crew size

Volume studies tested crews of two, four and six against published habitability standards. At six the model broke: with 80.5 cubic meters in total, the sleeping quarters consumed so much of the station that they had to be reduced to zero, and optimising instead for research space left nothing for the crew. Four was the number at which every function could coexist.

A proximity chart identified which functions could share volume. Sleeping quarters and washrooms are unused for most of the day, so the design avoids permanent sleeping quarters altogether, and the workstation doubles as an extension of the galley, with storage and dining for tourists when no research mission is aboard.

The station is planned for a sun-synchronous polar orbit, chosen to harvest the most solar energy, which raises radiation exposure. Habitable volume sits toward the core, with storage and hygiene pushed to the periphery as shielding.

Biophilic design

The ISS interior is technologically advanced and visually chaotic, with no sense of place. The redesign brings in biophilic design principles, drawing on Attention Restoration Theory: people concentrate and perform better after time in nature, or even after looking at scenes of nature. In a station with no windows to spare, that means evidence-based interior design rather than decoration.