Preparing for the unpredictable: facilitating multisystem resilience in human spaceflight

Human spaceflight is incredibly complex, and future missions will become more challenging. It will not be sufficient on longer and more ambitious missions simply to ensure that things do not go wrong (risk mitigation); it will also be necessary to provide the tools (tangible and intangible) for the crew and the mission to be resilient—to deal with the unexpected. This takes on increased importance when one recognizes that crews on distant missions will be largely autonomous and independent of help from Earth. We posit that this type of resilience will depend to a great extent on the proper functional integration of many different systems—human health and performance, spacecraft/habitat integrity, mission operations, and many others. These systems must work together synergistically to maintain performance and deal with the unexpected. Approaches to this problem can be drawn from the fields of resilience engineering, complex systems, and complex networks. This type of thinking has not yet been applied to human spaceflight in a systematic manner.