An Overview of the New HUMANS Analog Habitat

Designing Analog Habitats for Moon-to-Mars missions has often separated human factors studies from life support technology, or focused on isolated test rigs with limited architectural context. Existing analogs provide key insight on confinement and operations, but few offer a reconfigurable, ECLSS-centric habitat where architecture, operations, and resource cycles are developed at integrated system level. HUMANS - HUmans in the loop moon and Mars ANalog for Sustainability - is the newly born Analog Habitat of the IDEAS Interdepartmental Center at the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy, conceived to address this gap. HUMANS is conceived as an interior analog with hybrid capabilities: a pressurized habitat core, configurable ECLSS racks, an operations control segment, and interfaces to ISRU emulators and laboratories. A human metabolic simulator is integrated to reproduce crew loads without constant human presence. Air and water regeneration is implemented with a phased approach, at increasing levels of closure, reinforcing a design philosophy centered on resource circularity and sustainability. The facility will progress through phased campaigns: (i) uncrewed integrated tests of atmosphere, water, and waste loops on a physicochemical baseline; (ii) short human-in-the-loop campaigns focused on procedures, interfaces, and contingency operations; and (iii) extended campaigns in which bioregenerative, experimental, low-TRL technologies are incrementally integrated to explore higher closure and new operational envelopes across Moon-to-Mars mission archetypes. This paper presents the preliminary design of HUMANS based on the identified needs and environmental conditions stemming from actual space exploration missions in development, including layout, zoning of technical versus habitable spaces, ECLSS segregation and redundancy strategy, and routing of key utilities as primary architectural drivers. The architecture and design are supported by an integrated model-based workflow that links requirements, configurations, and simulations. HUMANS is intended as a long-term European infrastructure where habitat architecture, life support technologies, and sustainable terrestrial applications co-evolve in a controlled environment.