From the time human beings could adequately comprehend their view of the stars in the heavens, they sought to understand what existed beyond the Earth and their own place in the universe. Early in the history of humankind, the longing for traveling to distant worlds accompanied our determination to understand the universe, perhaps starting with a visit to the Moon. As our comprehension of space phenomena became more sophisticated, so too did our realization that space travel and settlement could occur only after solving numerous difficulties. This sophistication followed applications of rocketry in World War II and the following Cold War. Men and women who as children dreamed of traveling to other planets were put to work building the machines of war and participating in a Space Race. This outer space production has motivated weapons systems and reconnaissance systems used for defense and for making war. However, that production has also sent humans to the Moon and generated much scientific knowledge for the benefit of humanity, to include the reconnaissance about weather and the environmental condition of our planet and a level of technology that allows for cellular phone communication and rapid financial transactions. In these ways, humans have been explorers of the Cosmos. There is a cultural imperative to colonize environments beyond the Earth because that is a logical extension of these historical elements. Yet, this cultural imperative to colonize space has slowed in current times. When the Cold War wound down, the years following the United States' Apollo program seemed like a rejection of human space travel to extraterrestrial destinations. However weakly, though, our society still clings to the dream to colonize the Moon and then Mars to learn the lessons necessary to move far beyond both in terms of distance and development. Essential is the vigorous stimulation of this cultural imperative, because outer space production is key to the survival of the human species. I. Introduction: Leaving the Cradle T is probably best to start with Tsiolkovsky's famous quote, usually translated as: "Earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." § This sentiment succinctly defines the central argument made here. It refers to the cultural imperative to expand the human presence into new territories in order to allow human populations to improve their social lives. Humans have explored and colonized each of the Earth's land I

While expansion of space industry engineering standards over any human factors interface, except the humantechnology interface, is a still a relatively new topic (Dudley-Rowley & Bishop, 2002), even rarer still is the consideration of the latent challenges of long-duration space missions. A latent challenge in this venue could be a social, behavioral, or a natural or human-engineered environmental phenomenon. Manifest challenges to long-duration spaceflight are numerous enough, with mission planners, managers, and engineers taking into account obvious things like spacecraft operations, communications difficulties, having enough onboard resources, and protection of crew from an airless, microgravity environment fraught with radiation and other hazards. Latent challenges are harder to grasp. A latent challenge is any item, aspect, component, or process that potentially poses difficulties in the performance of mission objectives, but is something about which not much is known. However, a mission to Mars is a long-duration space mission that is a significantly different experience than a tour-of-duty of the same duration aboard a space station in full view of Earth, with easier access to new or needed equipment, more supplies, or even returnability. Social and behavioral phenomena in such an extreme environment could generate their own set of latent challenges. What steps could the crew take to ensure a high level of group functioning and minimize the impact to the accomplishment of mission objectives? How might design offset latent challenges on long-duration space missions? This report attempts to catalog the types of latent challenges that could pose difficulties to the longduration space mission, and then gives a multidisciplinary perspective of how design could respond to these challenges.

The authors investigate the overarching problem of sustainability of longduration space missions without which a permanent base on the Moon or exploration of Mars is impossible. To have sustainability in these exploration environments means that series of long-duration missions can be launched with a high degree of success and with a quality of life for the microsocieties that must live and work in the mission environments. Several categories of sustainability issues are discussed, among them: guaranteed and timely multi-year funding for the exploration host agencies, the existence of an "integrator function" that can fit together the findings and products of multiple and disparate research teams and technologies to generate do-able missions, regimes of preparation that answer the questions posed by all the indicators that define long-duration space exploration and which anticipate latent challenges to long-duration missions to the Moon and to Mars. If the United States is to be involved in the long-duration space effort, these regimes of preparation must include having the continuity of NASA institutional memory and the vigor of American postsecondary education. However, recent historical and political events have savaged the nation's space agency. And, approximately three decades of depredations in Academe has diminished the American brain trust available from among the nation's postsecondary institutions. In the wake of these events, several popular, but inadequate, propositions have emerged which cannot solve for sustainability issues of long-duration space exploration. Increasingly, the idea that the space endeavor is frivolous and has nothing to contribute to "on the ground" problems has risen among some scientific disciplines, especially in the social and behavioral sciences. For an integral picture that must be discerned before public policy can be adequately written concerning the national space effort as it looks to the Moon and Mars, the investigators draw upon the multiple disciplines of political science, history, international relations, aerospace and human factors engineering, aerospace architecture, organizational behavior analysis, education, and others in their discussion of long-duration space exploration sustainability.

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