Constance Adams helped Mars astronauts design homes



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Constance Adams,

Yale graduate architect, spent the first half of the 1990s working in Berlin and Tokyo. Then his career took an unexpected turn in space.

In 1995, she visited the Johnson Space Center at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Houston. During her tour, "a calm voice explained that one day we would go to Mars," she later told Harvard Magazine. "Of course, I sent my resume."

Working for Lockheed Martin Corp. and other contractors, she spent more than a decade on NASA projects, including the design of TransHab, an inflatable device that can carry astronauts. Mars or host them in a space station. As an architect working with engineers, she insisted that long-term space housing should not only be safe and efficient, but also welcoming enough that astronauts do not go crazy. TransHab featured neighborhoods and private ceilings high enough to allow astronauts to ride on treadmills.

NASA funding terminated the project, but Ms. Adams remained hopeful of a possible Mars mission. harsh environments on Earth.

Ms. Adams died of colorectal cancer in late June at her home in Houston. She was 53 years old.

TransHab is a three-level housing, accommodating six people, that can be squeezed into a cylinder for takeoff and inflated in space. Adams and her colleagues sought to help astronauts keep a rebaduring and mid-way impression in an environment of negligible gravity.

"You take out the gravity of the equation and everything becomes kablooey," said National Geographic. . "We have to help our astronauts force themselves to act as if things were normal."

Constance Marguerite DuQuesnay Adams was born on July 16, 1964 in Boston. She grew up partly in New Haven, Connecticut, where her father, Jeremy Adams, was a professor of medieval history at Yale University. After her parents divorced and her father and mother-in-law, Bonnie Wheeler, joined the faculty of Southern Methodist University, the family moved to Dallas, where she attended high school and high school

11 Moon landing on a hotel television in Hungary. "All these people came to see this event with the Americans," she told Metropolis magazine. "Apparently, there was that Hungarian voice that said it was just a movie made in Hollywood and that the Americans had not landed on the moon, and people were looking at us apologetically for . "

At Harvard University, she specialized in social studies and wrote a thesis on a modernist architectural manifesto led by Le Corbusier. She also designed an ivory tower erected at Harvard Yard to protest university investments in South Africa during apartheid.

After graduating as an architect at Yale, she worked on skyscraper drawings in Japan and urban planning in Berlin. 19659003] At NASA, she worked on BIO-Plex, a space dwelling with plant growth chambers and water cleaning technology. She has also worked on the Space Shuttle program and the International Space Station.

She then founded a consulting firm, Synthesis International, and helped Virgin Galactic of Richard Branson design a terminal that could one day accommodate space tourists to Spaceport America. New Mexico. She has also taught space architecture at Yale, at the University of Hong Kong and at the University of Houston.

His 2014 Dodge Challenger was red and had a gear lever. "It looked like a plane taking off," said Damon Silvers, a friend since his days at Harvard

. Adams is survived by two daughters, a brother, his mother-in-law and his mother, Madeleine de Jean, who writes about Champagne and other subjects.

Adams often lamented the decline in US spending on space exploration. "No nation in the history of the earth has failed to lead large projects and has remained significant," she said at a TEDx conference in 2011.

She also saw technological challenges as a fundamental human need. "We are this crazy creature," she told the Dallas Morning News in 2011. "We have to do things, and we have to do things with the things we do, and … when you start seeing things. as we bring forth from the planet, you think, maybe in the scheme of nature, it's our job to go to see other worlds.I can not imagine being so close to To be able to go to another world and not to do it. "

Write to James R. Hagerty at [email protected]

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