The pages
Everything That Changes When a Person Is Inside
A person aboard adds air, water, food, a pressure boundary, a way home and a dose limit. Each page below covers one of those; the robot fleet that works beside the crew is on Autonomy.
| Page | Holds | Rated |
|---|---|---|
| Habitats & Life Support | Three zones and two boundaries; closed-loop air and water; crew size | Observed |
| Space Suits | EMU, Orlan, Feitian, AxEMU and Wangyu; the suitport; the fitted glove | Observed |
| Crew Transport | Human-rated vehicles: Dragon, Soyuz, Shenzhou, Orion, Mengzhou, Starship; crewed rovers | Observed |
| Settlements | When a base becomes a settlement; food, power, who goes, and the first birth | Modeled |
| Radiation & Human Health | Measured doses from ISS to Mars; dose limits; bone, eyes and partial gravity | Observed |
| Workforce | Who trains, who flies, who works the ground; held under Players | Observed |
Crew size
Crew Size Is Designed, Not Discovered
The crew-hour sizing method, in seven steps.
- Total the outside work for the whole site, in EVA-hours (extravehicular activity), not per person.
- Pick the overhead multiplier from the architecture: airlock or suitport, cabin pressure, and excursion length.
- Split maintenance by which side of the pressure boundary it happens on.
- Add the hours spent servicing the robot fleet, times the same multiplier.
- Divide by 0.65, the share of a working day spent on core tasks.
- Divide by tasked hours per person: 1,098 on a six-month lunar tour, 3,292 on a Mars surface stay.
- Take the larger of that labor number and the political floor on crew size.
| Architecture | Overhead multiplier | Crew | Rated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suitport, long excursions | 1.5× | 6.7 | Modeled |
| Mixed | 2.5× | 10.3 | Modeled |
| Airlock, short excursions, sea-level cabin | 4.0× | 15.6 | Modeled |
The overhead multiplier is the hours a person spends getting ready, crossing the boundary and cleaning up, per hour of outside work. Its spread from 1.5 to 4.0 is the distance between two designs, not an uncertainty band: a suitport and long excursions sit at one end, an airlock and a sea-level cabin at the other.
A crew member gives about 6.5 tasked hours a day over a six-and-a-half-day week, about 42 hours, and an unused hour cannot be stored for next month's repair. At 2.5× overhead the modeled lunar site needs about 8,200 crew-hours over a six-month tour before any fleet servicing.
Perfect autonomy, taking fleet supervision to zero, removes less than one crew member. Replacing an airlock with mature suitports removes about six. The labor technology that matters most at an outpost is the door.
Announced lunar plans carry two to four crew. The method gives about 10 at realistic assumptions.
Dose
Everyone Who Works Outside Is a Radiation Worker
A suit carries two clocks: one for oxygen, one for career.
Shielding makes the habitat comparatively benign; it cannot shield the person doing the work outside. Every hour outside spends crew time and dose allowance together, so a crew of seven is seven radiation budgets being spent at the rate the work schedule sets.
| Operating profile | Habitat shielding | Work time outside | Career | Rated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Construction-heavy | Less shielding | 15% | About 2.6 years | Modeled |
| Steady operations | 3 m of regolith over the habitat | 10% | About 4.2 years | Modeled |
Machines do not accumulate cancer risk. A rover or humanoid working outside is a radiation shield with actuators, and its value is the human exposure it buys back. Dose limits and measured rates are on Radiation & Human Health; training and certification are on Workforce.
China
Chinese Programs Across the Human Layer
Station, crew vehicles, a lunar suit, the first lunar-surface dose data, and the ILRS base.
| Program | Data point | Rated |
|---|---|---|
| Tiangong · CMSA | Crewed since 2021; regenerative water and electrolysis oxygen | Observed |
| Shenzhou · CMSA | China's crew vehicle since Yang Liwei on Shenzhou-5, 2003 | Observed |
| Mengzhou and Lanyue · CMSA | Crew vehicle and lunar lander for a landing before 2030 | Building |
| Wangyu lunar suit · CMSA | Named in 2024 for the crewed landing | Building |
| Chang'e-4 LND · CNSA and Kiel University | First dose measurement on the lunar surface, 2019 | Observed |
| ILRS · CNSA and Roscosmos | South-pole research station; basic model by 2035 | Projected |
Contested
Deliberately Not Claimed
The load-bearing uncertainties, tagged with the confidence they actually earn.
The method stops at the Moon. The 0.65 core-task fraction comes from lunar tour planning; no derivation exists for a Mars surface stay.
EVA-hours are a site total. The 1,750 EVA-hours of a six-month lunar tour are for the whole crew; reading them per person inflates suit water and wear several times over.
Record
Provenance and Data Sources
- Confidence
- Observed for flown, fielded or measured - Building for hardware and programs in development - Projected for announced plans - Modeled for original analysis
- Status date
- Q4 2026
- Data
- NASA, ESA, CMSA and Roscosmos crew and station records
- China
- CMSA Tiangong, Shenzhou, Mengzhou, Lanyue and Wangyu; CNSA Chang'e-4; ILRS
- Weakest link
- The 0.65 core-task fraction beyond the Moon