Habitat & Crew Safety

OrbitExSpace Inc. ("OrbitExSpace", "we", "us") develops habitat technologies for extreme environments, with a long-term focus on the Moon and Mars. At the date of this statement, our habitat work is at the conceptual and terrestrial-prototype stage. This page describes the safety and standards framework we will apply as that work matures toward systems that may one day support human presence.

Future habitats will be designed to protect their occupants from the hazards of the surface environment — thermal extremes, radiation, dust, pressure differential, and atmospheric composition — with redundancy on life-critical functions and the ability to recover from failures. We will not declare a habitat safe for occupancy until its safety case has been completed and reviewed.

We will design future habitats to applicable standards, including recognized engineering standards for pressure vessels, life support, fire safety, and human factors, adapted to the extraterrestrial context. Where no applicable standard exists, we will develop an internal standard based on first principles and document the reasoning.

Environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS) — atmosphere, water, waste, thermal, and food — will be designed with redundancy, monitoring, and reserve capacity appropriate to a survival-critical function. We will test ECLSS to endurance and to failure, and we will not commit an ECLSS design to crewed use until its reliability has been demonstrated.

OrbitExSpace is not currently developing crewed systems. If and when we do, we will apply the heightened standards that human spaceflight demands: failure tolerance for critical functions, crew-survival analysis across mission phases, abort capability where feasible, and compliance with applicable human-rating requirements. We will not expose crew to unquantified risk.

Life support is survival-critical. We will design for graceful degradation, maintain consumable reserves, and provide the capability to isolate and recover from faults. Where a failure could be fatal, the system will be designed to fail safe or to fail with sufficient time for response.

These commitments are forward-looking. We have not built a habitat intended for occupancy, we do not currently develop crewed systems, and we have not certified any habitat for any use. This page describes the framework we will apply as our habitat work matures.

OrbitExSpace Inc.
Los Angeles, California
habitats@orbitexspace.com