NASA has joined with partners in the International Space Station project to draft potential standards governing future deep space exploration.
These efforts focus on seven areas, seen as critical to cooperation on a global scale: avionics, communications, environmental control and life support systems, power systems, rendezvous systems, robotics and thermal systems. By standardizing the approach to exploration platforms, NASA and its partners hope to support a unified approach without restricting the actual design potential therein.
The standards build upon existing goodwill that went into global efforts to make the International Docking System Standard–that used to provide compatible, universal docking systems for the International Space Station.
“Contributions from the global community will improve the quality of the interoperability standards and help enable development of the systems necessary to meet global exploration goals,” William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said. “Having compatible hardware will allow differing designs to operate with each other. This could allow for crew rescue missions and support from any spacecraft built to these standards.”
The partners hope to have a final version of these standards completed by this summer.