Code Space

In space, everything is architecture.1
—Elvia Wilk

Architecture and infrastructure mediate our relationship with pre-existing environments. When the environment in question is as hostile as outer space, there is no existence possible without that mediation. Out there, everything is architecture—it’s not just that there is no outside, there cannot be one—but everything is also infrastructure. As a result, the things that underlie and support us come to the foreground. On Earth, the built environment is, along with food and medicine, one of the most heavily regulated dimensions of human societies. It is possible to make the case that these modes of regulation are a kind of soft infrastructure, with real and hard consequences. It is surprising, then, that despite the extreme environment that outer space presents, this domain has, for the moment, generated not more overarching regulation, but less.

The proliferation of rules, standards, norms, and laws that define the dimensions and material properties of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, and transportation are a true infra-structure. They are abstract and immaterial; they lie beneath and (sometimes literally) produce the concrete aspects of the world we move through every day. When we, as designers and builders of the structures that shape people’s lives, have to reckon with these often tangled directives, it can feel mind-numbingly boring at best, and desperately frustrating at worst. But the basis for their existence is downright utopian.

Conceptual utopian ideals exist upstream from standards that produce hard reality. As the late critic Fredric Jameson insists, utopian thinking exists in order to critique the existing dominant frame, the status quo. “Utopianism needs to nourish itself on the experiential conviction that radically different futures are possible and that change exists.”2 Rather than remaining forever in this other plane, or directly falling into material history like some Platonic form, for Jameson, considering politics at large, utopian thinking is translated step-by-step by way of revolution, and, as he puts it, “the party,” by which he means collective effort. Considering ways that standards and codes might be related to utopian idealism might reveal mechanisms that bring these structures to ground, and then potentially raise them up again.

Model Rules

In the United States, the National Council of Architectural Registrations Boards (NCARB) sets the standards that need to be met for someone to claim the professional title of “architect,” which, along with other designations like “doctor” and “lawyer,” is legally protected and regulated. NCARB also issues “Model Rules of Conduct” to describe the expectations that go along with that title.3 The foremost guiding principle for these rules recognizes that architects’ primary obligation is to the “health, safety, and welfare” of the public.4 Even though architects as professionals offer services for fees to private clients, and therefore act in that client’s interest, in legal terms, the interests of the public should come first, and should override those of the client’s if they come into conflict. The strictest interpretation of the NCARB’s Model Rules says that architects, even in daily life, are required to report and attempt to make good on any conditions in the built environment that they observe as unsafe or short of legal requirements, even if they have nothing professionally to do with the work at hand.5 In a sense, the existence of the figure of the architect literally embodies and protects the public good, and enacts the kind of critique of the status quo that Jameson finds in utopianism.

The architects’ very existence is regulated. A further layer of regulation and law, building code, helps define expectations and methodologies for the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare in the built environment. Fire codes, for example, exist to preserve human life first, and prevent property loss second. Egress paths are designed like river tributaries, sized to accept the maximum number of possible inhabitants that might be inside a structure at any given time and funnel them to safety. Code requires these paths to be deliberately redundant: there should be at least two ways out of heavily occupied spaces, in case one is blocked by the emergency. Another guiding principle specifies that each space a person encounters on their way out should be more safe than the space they’ve just left. Egress corridors are constructed to resist fire damage longer than the rooms they service, and exit stair towers are made to last even longer than that. Wall assembly types are rated according to their timed ability to resist fire during the course of its spread. Material choices, construction methods, and active systems like sprinklers for fire suppression and ducts for smoke evacuation all function infrastructurally and together with the configuration of the architecture to provide safe routes to the exterior.

In an emergency, something seemingly simple like finding a door handle where you expect to in the dark and smoke can make the difference between life and death. Codes therefore tend to normalize certain key dimensions and properties. Whether jurisdiction is in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or the United States, code will place door hardware somewhere in a relatively narrow range of only about forty centimeters. And the zones where standards overlap will always be the safest place to locate, and to search for, the handle.

Standard height ranges for door hardware mounting in various building code jurisdictions, 2024. Image: Fred Scharmen.

Human Factors

Standards, codes, and guidelines must be based on the dimensions of a hypothetically average human being; a fraught undertaking when we are looking to address the widest possible range of body types and abilities. In space, these aspects of dimension and ability—known as “Human Factors”—are the primary drivers of the kinds of standards and guidelines that NASA uses to regulate the design of habitats and vehicles. In space, everything may be architecture, but to organizations like NASA, architecture is inherently a practice in the domain of system design. So instead of building code, what serves in its place is known as “Human Systems Integration.” The basis for the anthropometric information that NASA uses to design its equipment is in military data collected from new recruits, which is then statistically normalized to create model populations of users.

Instead of converging, however, guidelines and standards for space hardware and environments tend to proliferate and diverge. Just among the space stations that currently exist in orbit or on the drawing boards that might serve future NASA undertakings, many standards exist. One set of Human Systems Integration guidelines defines the design and construction of the International Space Station (ISS). Another set of guidelines regulates the designers of the Chinese Tiangong station, also currently in orbit with a crew of three. China’s hardware designs tend to be based on Russian and Soviet precedents. The planned Gateway station, with modules under construction right now and due to orbit around the Moon as part of the Artemis Program in just a few years, has still other guidelines that define it. Gateway’s components are around two-thirds the diameter of the modules in ISS. There’s simply less room inside, so dimensional standards in sleeping spaces, for example, have to be revisited, compromised, and downgraded.

As recently as 2023, NASA was soliciting industry partners and academics for input on new guidelines that would help define the safety and usability of the three competing proposals for next generation space stations to be built and operated by private companies, in a program known as CLD, or “Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations.” The International Space Station is suffering from metal fatigue and microfractures in its joints, which will eventually render it unsafe and unusable. One or more of these competing proposed projects will be leased by NASA and other private partners in anticipation of the eventual ISS de-orbit in around 2030. One station proposal is designed by Axiom, while another station, named Starlab, is by a group led by Voyager Space and Airbus. Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, has designed a third station, Orbital Reef, in a way that they hope will make it function as a kind of “mixed use business park” in space.6

Where emergency is concerned, the International Space Station and other installations use a nautical model instead of an architectural one. There are no stair towers here but there are lifeboats. At any given time, according to this principle, there should be enough seats available in spacecraft that can return to Earth as there are humans aboard the station. In actual nautical architecture on Earth, the number of lifeboat seats is almost always twice the number of passengers and crew. But this redundant safety factor is left behind in space, at least for now. At the time of writing, two astronauts, Suni Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, were, for an interval, left in space without a guaranteed ride home. Engineers determined that anomalies in their (still experimental) Boeing Starliner spacecraft necessitated its automated return without them. In the period before another ship could be sent up to take them back to Earth, crew rigged up an extra two seats in another craft out of discarded clothes and other padding, in case an emergency meant everyone had to evacuate.

Again, unlike the converging standards that put a door handle in a place we’d expect during an emergency, the form and function of these evacuation spacecraft has started to become very different. What this means is that if a crew member makes it to the nearest lifeboat, there’s no guarantee that they would be trained on the equipment’s interfaces and affordances. The instrument panel in Boeing’s Starliner command module, which is still being flight tested, is very different from the interfaces in the current generation of Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which have been flying in some form or another since 1967. The Soyuz interior was originally designed by a Soviet architect named Galina Balashova, the first true space architect, but the clarity of Balashova’s work from the 1960s is now buried under layers of accreted complexity. The instrumentation designed by SpaceX for their Dragon spacecraft is heavily influenced by automotive design and heavily reliant on touchscreens and special gloves that work with them.7 Beyond issues raised by these control affordances, the different seats in the vehicles are designed to connect to each company’s specially-designed custom flight suits. In an emergency, you might find yourself able to access an escape vehicle, and even if you had the training to operate it, you might not be able to sit down. In space, everything is infrastructure, and when that infrastructure isn’t regulated, the health, safety, and welfare of the spacefaring public is at risk.

Control panel affordances for various spacecraft, from left to right: Boeing Starliner, Soyuz, SpaceX Dragon, 2024. Montage: Fred Scharmen

There are some success stories, though. The Androgynous Peripheral Attach System for docking spacecraft was first developed jointly by engineers from the United States and Soviet space programs in the 1970s in order to facilitate the Apollo Soyuz Test Project, a mission in which Russian and American crews linked up for the first time in space. This event marked the end of the “Space Race” to land on the Moon, and it’s also one of the many beginnings of the end of the Cold War. This docking protocol and hardware is the ancestor of the interface that allows Russian and American modules to connect on the International Space Station today, and since China’s space hardware was developed from Russian designs, they use the same protocol too. The United States and China do not currently cooperate in space, but thanks to the codes that define this infrastructure, they could.

The Mechanism of Infrastructural Utopianism, 2024. Image: Fred Scharmen.

Infrastructural Utopianism

This is a kind of infrastructural utopianism, where concrete hardware standards meet abstract aspirations. Codes bring about the material manifestation of utopian ideals by way of translations—first into guaranteed rights, and then into law. The aspiration to protect “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as the United States Declaration of Independence has it, becomes, in a document like the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution, a set of explicit but non-exhaustive enumerated rights. Law then gives the government the capacity to regulate and protect those rights, which are finally enshrined in standards.

Things are not always so clear in practice, though. Histories of building code often start almost 4,000 years ago, with the code of Hammurabi, which includes a few lines about home construction: “If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.” In practice, it seems, humans have had something like building code since long before we had basic rights, or at least since before those rights were enumerated and written down. Only later, we might say, did these street level modalities percolate upwards into lofty abstractions.

In his famous July 4th speech in 1852, Frederick Douglass used the gap between ideal and reality to critique the state. “Would you have me argue,” he says, “that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it.”8 By taking the stated ideals in the Declaration of Independence at their word, that “all men are created equal,” Douglass was able to point out the obvious failure to follow through on those utopian ideals. Sojourner Truth performed a related operation in another speech in 1851. Popularly known as “Ain’t I a Woman?,” Truth’s speech helped expand that abstract category of “man” to all humankind, not just white males with property.9 These events and others contributed to eventual revisions of the constitution itself, with the 13th Amendment directly outlawing slavery. Once ideals were more carefully defined, laws and regulations eventually followed suit, codifying integration in the built environment.

In the domain of space today, we can find that the two ends of the spectrum of infrastructural utopianism—ideals and codes—are sites of active work. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is full of ideals and is as utopian a document as you’ll ever be likely to find in the realm of international law.10 It specifies that no state can claim sovereign territory in places away from Earth. In Article V, the treaty goes even further, specifying that anyone carrying on activities in outer space has certain rights and responsibilities when it comes to others doing the same. Especially important here is the principle of mutual aid. If an astronaut is in distress, and needs any kind of aid that another astronaut is in a position to provide, then that second, better equipped astronaut has an obligation to offer it. On the other hand, we have standards and guidelines, which though they proliferate, are disjointed, and don’t always support the ideals that they are downstream of. We should therefore work towards filling in the missing parts of the spectrum of infrastructural utopianism, rights and laws.

In her brief essay “A Rant About ‘Technology,’” Ursula K. Le Guin says that technology is not just limited to what’s “hard” or “high”; it’s not just fighter jets and computers.11 Technology is also soft and low, and encompasses things like textiles, cookware, books, songs, and the stories they contain. “Technology,” according to Le Guin, is “the active human interface with the material world.” Accordingly, technology is everything that mediates between people, the world they live in, and each other. By extension, we can talk about social systems as technology; we can talk about economics as a technology; we can see political action as technology. By this metric, foundational documents that define how life in outer space should be conducted, like the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, are necessary equipment for the work of maximizing human survival in the hostile environment of space and the fragile worlds we build there. But this toolkit remains incomplete. A declaration of rights and responsibilities, based on, as NCARB’s Model Rules of Conduct have it, “a standard of care,” is every bit as important as a space suit. Building codes, like Le Guin’s soft technology, are a kind of soft infrastructure. They define the parameters of those interfaces. In a place like outer space, where everything is architecture, everything underlying that architecture should support mutual aid, and benefit the health, safety, and welfare of an all-too-vulnerable public.