Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Turning the World Right Side Up.... IN SPACE!!!!

One of the many challenges astronauts face while aboard the International Space Station is disorientation.  Basically humans don't really do well when they see things that don't make sense, this includes people working away at a position 90 degrees offset from what they consider the "correct" orientation.  This sense of disorientation has led to crew aboard the space station to temporarily become lost.  There have been several proposals to promote a more consistent sense of direction, this could, at least partially, be handled by painting a consistent up/down color scheme, up is blue, down is brown, something similar to the horizons here on Earth. (honestly I wrote brown without thinking the rhyming was fun, but unintended).  This is a starting point, but assumes that the space craft is built as a borderline plainer structure, something that the ISS is not.  Future space stations are also unlikely to be built in a roughly 2 dimensional configuration, so let us expand this design rational into the 3rd dimension (if you could read this with a dramatic voice that would be awesome).  Future space-craft could use a design reference system that would provide an absolute sense of direction, similar to how naval vessels use the terms, port, starboard, fore, and aft (honestly you really just need more authoritative sounding terms for up and down).  Each direction would have a corresponding color and physical texture.  Seeing as port and starboard already have red and green, respectively, it might as well be worth keeping them as is.  The other colors and textures, I will leave to others to decide, personally I would suggest "up" be a lighter color, "down" to a darker one.  To aid in astronaut's sense of orientation, the inside of buildings here on Earth could also be treated with this coloring and texturing.  Major players  NASA, ESA, JAXA, SpaceX, etc... would need to agree on this design scheme, but in the end, every perspective explorer of the stars could have a shared sense of direction.


Quick note, I can't find the article I read that first talked about using color schemes for orientation, I will try to provide the link at a later time.

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