Human-centered design of upcoming human missions to Mars

Human missions to Mars are not only a matter of technology-centered engineering, it is foremost a matter of human-centered design (HCD) where technology, organizations and people roles should be co-designed in a participatory and agile way. Major human-centered components are trajectory and propulsion (defining HCD in terms of time), life-support (physiological, psychological and social factors), exploration (jobs during flights and on the planet) and anticipation of a Martian civilization (governance, natural and artificial resource management). I will review a few experiments that were conducted so far, such as Mars-500, MDRS and what we are doing in HCD, such as key cognitive and social concepts of operations that rely on situation awareness and decision-making, complexity analysis, dealing with the unexpected, automation and autonomy, and collaborative work. I will develop the perspective that human-systems integration (HSI) is a matter of integrating HCD and systems engineering. We then need to orchestrate the design of the various structures and functions involved in human Mars operations. This orchestration can be made using modeling and human-in-the-loop simulations looking for emerging cognitive and physical functions towards the definition of underlying cyber-physical systems. HSI can be managed in terms of design flexibility, resource commitments, and human-systems knowledge.