Helped Design The Proposed TransHab Inflatable Module For ISS, Future Missions

An architect to gave up designing skyscrapers for something that would soar a little higher has Gone West. Constance Adams died at her home in Houston Monday at the age of 53 due to complications from colorectal cancer.

The New York Times reports that Adams became interested in the space program after taking a tour of the Johnson Space Center while interviewing for an architectural job in Houston in 1996. She later went on to help design the TransHab (Transit Habitat) with NASA space architect Kriss Kennedy. It was intended to be attached to the outside of the International Space Station to augment living quarters for astronauts aboard the station, as well as use on a future Mars mission.

But while a full-size prototype was built, the project was never funded. In would have added 12,000 cubic feet of living space to the cramped quarters utilized by astronauts aboard the ISS.

Adams was born in Boston July 16, 1964. She graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in social studies and wrote her senior thesis on Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French Modernist architect. After earning a master’s in architecture at Yale, she interned with the architect César Pelli.

A smaller version of TransHab was built by Bigelow Aerospace, which licensed the technology from NASA and deployed to the ISS as an "expandable activity module".

(Image provided by NASA)

FMI: Original report