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Skyscrapers were not enough for Constance Adams. The architect wanted to go even higher. Her destination was Mars, but she never saw NASA making the commitments that would have brought her plans to the red planet.
Adams, who died last week, was best known for her designs for TransHab (Transit Habitat), a three-storey, Kevlar-coated inflatable environment developed for a manned mission to Mars. It looked a bit like an insulated water boiler, but its bulbous aesthetic belied a series of high tech innovations including extreme insulation, the ability to fold into a small, lightweight package ($ 2 million to propel each kilogram additional space), and protection against flying space debris from birds based on bulletproof vests. The module housed accommodations for the crew, a gym, a kitchen with 12 seats and an infirmary. She then adapted the design to become a modular potential spacecraft.
Adams was particularly interested in the ways in which daily life in a hostile environment could be made more comfortable and humane. It may have been unfortunate to join the space program at a time when the US government was cutting back its lavish spending. Yet Adams has become a strong advocate for visionary projects and government support. She pointed out that at the top of the US space program in the late 1960s, NASA employed 400,000 people and suggested that manufacturing, innovation and the very idea of the nation were linked to space exploration. The United States had ceded the status to China, Adams said. "No nation in the history of the earth has failed to lead big projects and has remained significant," she said at a TEDx conference in 2011.
Adams was born in Boston in 1964 by Jeremy DuQuesnay Adams, a medieval scholar from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Madeleine de Jean, a writer and connoisseur of champagne.
She studied architecture at Harvard and continued at Yale, after which she interned with César Pelli (architect of London Tower Canary Wharf) in New Haven, Connecticut. She went to work in Japan with the late Kenzo Tange, a visionary architect whose work often seemed to predict forms of extraplanar implantation, and then in Berlin with the late Josef Paul Kleihues, where she worked on urban masterplanning. A job at the US defense contractor Lockheed Martin then brought him to NASA.
Adams said that her greatest source of pride was her work on the International Space Station, which she described as "probably the greatest human achievement of all time, in that 15 different nations have invested non-military money; billions of dollars for the cooperative construction, maintenance and operation of a scientific platform in the space. "
His creations included work on the experimental return vehicle of the X38 crew, considered a smaller and less expensive alternative to the space shuttle (the program was canceled in 2002) and on its successor, the orbital space plane. Also consulting on Spaceport America, the odd horseshoe-shaped horseshoe shaped terminal in the New Mexico desert designed by Foster + Partners for Virgin Galactic Despite being completed in 2010 , the space oport has not yet launched its first flight.
Antoinette Nbadopoulos-Erickson, an architect at Foster + Partners who worked with Adams on the project, described it as "an absolute fire." "You knew that she was in the room … She was persistent and was not afraid to let people know what she was thinking." This persistence was probably a consequence of her. not only a woman architect but a woman architect in space architecture. "
Among Adams' contributions were the furniture and interiors that could make life in the space more tolerable – even pleasant. Speaking to Wired magazine last year from a collaboration with Ikea to make furniture for Mars, she said, "The things we badume are a constant, like gravity, change in these environments. The only thing that stays the same is the human. "
On the complexities of designing a seat for space travel, Adams explained," When you get to 13G in the Y Plus [axis] 9G in the least Y and 6Gs up to your bad, sitting is not the problem. She used these ideas to inform a visionary design for a hospital bed, which remains undeveloped.
Wry, witty and engaging, Adams urged the United States to reaffirm its position as a space power. question for our age, she suggested, is: "What is our Sputnik moment?"
"I can imagine a visitor of our solar system come in and see [the space station] and go," Oh, there is from the company in the neighborhood. There are manufacturers somewhere in this system. ""
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