It's the kind of night to stay inside: negative 170 degrees, pitch dark, silent. But no matter how nice a cup of tea sounds, the urge is best left unfulfilled - because, of course, it's not easy using a toilet on the moon.
Carl Conlee and Evan Twyford, 2005 graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, have been working at NASA for two years solving problems just like these. Their challenge: to design a lunar rover capable of housing two astronauts comfortably - relatively speaking - for two weeks.
"It's like trying to pack all of the amenities of an apartment into something the size of a minivan," Conlee said. His designs, ranging from food storage to astronaut seating, include a toilet that handily pulls out like a drawer.
Conlee and Twyford, industrial design majors and one-time roommates, are part of a 30-person team working to develop the pressurized lunar rover. This rover, about nine cubic meters in volume, is part of a larger NASA program, Project Constellation, which aims to create a permanent colony on the moon, Conlee said.
The rover would be just one element of this colony. Short expeditions in full spacesuit protection aside, a pair of astronauts would live exclusively in the rover - eating, sleeping, exercising and performing research. If all goes as planned, Conlee said, the rover should be ready in 2020.
Graduating from RISD gave the two men the "unique point of view to develop human-centered design," Conlee said, adding that his education prepared him to work hard and think openly about problems.
NASA and RISD are two acronyms not commonly seen in the same sentence; 25-year-old Conlee said he never could have anticipated a career with the space agency. But Conlee and Twyford's career paths are "not crazy at all," said Leslie Fontana, chair of the industrial design department at RISD. According to Fontana, designing for space isn't so different from designing for Earth.
The industrial design program, Fontana said, teaches its roughly 70 graduates per year the "ability to take good ideas and make them viable to other people" - a skill that has come in handy for Conlee and Twyford.
Their team draws on different backgrounds and skill sets, Conlee said. Although the RISD graduates do some mechanical design, they do very little engineering. Instead, he said, they focus on the more "psychological effect" of design by trying to make such a small space as comfortable and efficient as possible.
Project Constellation's permanent moon colony would be used for research but would also serve as a large-scale "science experiment," a model for establishing a similar settlement on Mars, Conlee said.
"When I was little, I was interested in any fast and cool machine," Conlee said. "But nothing like this. ... There are definitely days where I stop and say, 'This is pretty cool.'"
