In short:
An archaeological study is underway into how areas are used on the International Space Station.
Researchers have found most spaces are not used the way they were intended.
What’s next?
The findings can help guide the design of future International Space Station modules.
Your shed workbench may be a place of infinite mess where functionality gives way to clutter, but on the edges of infinity itself, it appears astronauts face the same problem.
The International Space Station Archaeological Project at Flinders University has been documenting several square-metre sections of the ISS as they are used in orbit about 400 kilometres above Earth.
Marked with adhesive tape, the sections include a kitchen table, workstations, the wall near the toilet and an area designated for maintenance, with daily photographs taken of the squares for two months.
Associate Professor Alice Gorman said archaeologists found areas on the ISS designated for certain tasks would not actually be used for their intended purpose.
“In this maintenance area, maintenance was the least common activity,” she told ABC Radio Adelaide.
“The most common activity was storage, so people would put objects and items there, to keep them fixed down. They would come back and find them in the same place and go on to use them in another part of the station.
“It was kind of a halfway house and no one knew that before.”
Taking ownership of space
You may also find in your workplace that a common area such as a bench or unused cupboard mysteriously falls under the ownership of a colleague due to the fact they store their belongings there.
This is the case on the International Space Station too, where a square surveyed near the latrine and exercise area with no designated use was utilised by one astronaut to store their toiletry bag.
“By putting their toiletry bag there and leaving it there for so long, they actually made it their own private space,” Ms Gorman said.
“They kind of invisibly, or metaphorically, demarcated it as their little bathroom or storage cupboard.”
Such behaviour may sound unremarkable, or perhaps even perfunctory to us gravity dwellers, but the research becomes useful when considering future designs.
“It gives us an insight into what the crew actually do, and this is what we want to use to design better space stations for the future,” Ms Gorman said.
Tackling gravity with Velcro
Led my Ms Gorman and Professor Justin Walsh from Chapman University in California, the team also observed how astronauts overcame the lack of gravity.
“In one square that we studied, almost half of all the objects moved in and out were gravity surrogates, things such as Velcro, bungee cords, clips, carabiners and resealable plastic bags that keep objects in place instead of everything floating around,” Ms Gorman said.
“In another square, this was 30 per cent of all the items moved in and out, so if we extrapolate that out across the whole station, it shows just how much these objects are used.”
Post-it notes were also used heavily across the ISS.
Ms Gorman said most people believed archaeology was entombed firmly in the past by analysing the findings of field work and dig sites.
“Most archaeologists don’t get the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, mate. Your house designed here 6,000 years ago — we’ve got some ideas about how you could put those windows in a better place’,” she said.
“But we do, because we can say to NASA, to other space agencies and to big firms … that design space station modules, we actually know some things through archaeology that will help you design a better station, so we get to impact the present.”
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