Human Factors as an ORCA Performance Domain

A cultivation system enters a habitat as work as well as hardware. Crew members must notice its states, answer its alerts, handle its food, and recover it from faults. ORCA’s performance record can place those demands beside yield and environmental control, and Gastronaut can begin measuring them during ground development.

This approach makes no claim that ORCA improves mood or cognition. It gives Gastronaut a responsibility it can discharge through evidence: measure how the system affects the people who operate beside it, then use the result in design. The engineering decision is whether human performance will remain an external assumption or become an ORCA performance domain.

An evidence gap between experience and burden

The bounded neurocognitive synthesis retained 553 analysable studies from 5,382 unique records. Of these, 393 involved humans in spaceflight or a ground analog. The corpus covered affect and mood in 162 records, cognition and performance in 162, sleep and fatigue in 158, team and habitability outcomes in 33, and horticultural or nature-exposure outcomes in six. It separately classified 14 records as horticultural or nature-exposure interventions. Because full-text retrieval did not run, these abstract-level categories do not map every measure in each paper.

Here the literature splits experience from system burden. Seventeen of 553 abstracts mentioned crew time, mass, volume, power, shelf life, or another system-cost term. The synthesis identified no abstract that paired a psychological benefit with the cost of the countermeasure that produced it. One paper reports crew time without a psychological outcome; another reports a horticultural response without crew time. Neither record, by itself, lets NASA judge the service relationship. Mission value depends on bringing them together.

Zeidler and colleagues provide an operating example. Across the 2018 and 2019 EDEN ISS experiment phases, the Antarctic greenhouse produced 646 kilograms of edible biomass. For 2019, the team measured 694.5 crew-hours, or 6.31 crew-hours per kilogram, and found that the on-site operator team used about four times the hours of the remote support team (Zeidler et al. 2021). These figures describe analog operations, not lunar costs. They also show that workload can be measured with enough structure to guide design.

Human-outcome studies supply a separate, bounded record. In a laboratory and isolated-environment study, viewing strawberry plants was associated with changes in cortisol, mood, anxiety, and reaction time; the long-duration crew component showed a similar mood trend without statistical significance (Li et al. 2020). A controlled 45-day analog study associated an enhanced diet with lower cortisol and better scores for cognitive speed, accuracy, and attention in 16 participants (Douglas et al. 2022). These results justify measurement. Neither establishes what an ORCA installation would do.

Confidence is high that cultivation labor and workload are measurable. Confidence is moderate that plant and diet exposures can be studied alongside behavioral outcomes in ground analogs. Confidence is low in any claim that ORCA itself improves crew behavioral health.

Define human performance at the interface

Gastronaut is developing ORCA as a 2.0-meter-diameter modular cultivation enclosure. Its proposed research range from 0.1 g to 1.0 g and nominal operation from 0.5 g to 0.65 g are design objectives. The system remains at approximately TRL 3 to 4 in ground development and has completed no flight or lunar cycles.

Gastronaut’s internal record covers 1,042 ground growth cycles over 18 to 24 months. That record can support analysis of task frequency, intervention types, alarm patterns, maintenance, and recovery. It does not establish crew outcomes, flight reliability, food safety, variable-gravity performance, biological efficacy, or system economics.

Human factors become reviewable at six interfaces:

1. Attention. Which states require monitoring, how often alerts occur, and how clearly they distinguish action from information.
2. Action. Which tasks remain manual, how long they take, what skill they require, and whether procedures fit mission work patterns.
3. Recovery. How operators detect, diagnose, and recover from contamination, sensor, irrigation, climate, or crop events.
4. Food interaction. How harvest, preparation, offering, consumption, acceptability, and waste enter the crew’s day.
5. Experience. How proximity, light, sound, odor, visual access, and voluntary interaction are perceived under declared conditions.
6. Continuity. Whether remote support, automation, spares, and data make the service sustainable when crew attention is constrained.

Each interface can carry a measure, threshold, and disposition rule. A workload result may trigger redesign. Recovery beyond a declared time may change the automation requirement. A positive experience rating can remain an experience result without becoming a clinical benefit. The engineering record can then give every result a defined place and a responsible use.

Build evidence into the product cycle

The existing record is the starting point. Gastronaut can map the 1,042 ground cycles to a common task and fault taxonomy, noting which fields were recorded consistently and which require prospective capture.

Next comes prospective ground testing. Operators can run repeatable crop cycles while task time, workload, alerts, errors, recovery, and food handling are measured. Different automation and remote-support configurations can then be compared.

A crewed analog would put the human record on the same timeline. Human-research partners can add mood, sleep, fatigue, cognition, acceptability, and perceived-restoration measures under a privacy plan. Practice effects, timing, background diet, caffeine, medications, and environmental conditions should be prespecified.

NASA would then conduct a flight-readiness review. The combined evidence may support a flight feasibility study, further redesign, or a stop decision. Gastronaut can show which requirements are demonstrated, which remain design objectives, and which depend on a future mission.

A capability NASA can inspect

Gastronaut proposes an ORCA human-factors data package: a task model, workload protocol, alert and recovery log, food-interaction record, behavioral-measurement interface, and privacy boundary. Together, they would provide an auditable account of how the system and its operators affect one another.

The capability is not a promise of wellbeing. It is a platform designed to learn from crew interaction while accounting for crew time and experience. Human factors becomes engineering evidence. Service becomes part of system performance. The demands placed on a crew become visible before NASA makes a flight decision.

References

Douglas, Grace L., et al. “Impact of Diet on Human Nutrition, Immune Response, Gut Microbiome, and Cognition in an Isolated and Confined Mission Environment.” Scientific Reports, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21927-5.

Gastronaut. Neurocognitive and Behavioral Health: Evidence Synthesis. Report GAS-B4-NEU-20260822, evidence version 22 Aug. 2026. Research synthesis.

Li, Zhao-Ming, et al. “Psychophysiological and Cognitive Effects of Strawberry Plants on People in Isolated Environments.” Journal of Zhejiang University Science B, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1631/jzus.b1900331.

Zeidler, Conrad, et al. “Crew Time and Workload in the EDEN ISS Greenhouse in Antarctica.” Life Sciences in Space Research, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lssr.2021.06.003.

Gastronaut. ORCA Public-Safe System and Evidence Baseline. Evidence version 23 Aug. 2026. Company technical record.