Environmental Control and Life Support for Deep Space Travel

NASA has outlined plans to transition from the Low Earth Orbit toward Earth independent exploration, evolving habitat capacity to support a trip to Mars, and return home three years later. The Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) are being developed to enable this vision. UTC Aerospace Systems (UTAS) completed the first phase of this advancement, or NextSTEP, in September 2016, and is currently working on the second phase designing a universal ELCSS Module to support the different habitats currently being developed. With focus on the final exploration configuration the team is developing elements that can be used to support future ECLS hardware. The areas of development included transition from the cislunar design to an exploratory ECLS, the development of an Universal ECLSS Pallet design that enhances in-flight maintenance, an Integrated ECLSS Hierachial Control Architecture and the development of an Intelligent System intended to aide in isolating the cause of any fault. The overarching design activities included in this effort define a time dependent strategy enabling deep space exploration.