The Surface Endoskeletal Inflatable Module (SEIM)

With the development of the TransHab hybrid inflatable habitat, a team at NASA's Johnson Space Center broke with historical paradigms by developing the first endoskeletal space module. The value of this design was cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and the possibility for new forms to support human-rated vehicles and modules for exploration missions. The "TransHab Paradigm" is a complex, semi-inflatable vehicle whose two basic configurations — launch and deployed — are each optimized for their respective environments while retaining fundamental system integration for autonomy and efficient deployment. In this study, the architecture team has undertaken to adapt the paradigm in two ways: first, by designing a module with similar operations concept, but operating in a different environment — that of a planetary surface; and second, by streamlining the relationship between the hard and membranous structures that make up this type of module's principal components.