By all accounts sleeping in space is a dream. After a long day of running experiments and rigorous exercise, astronauts on the International Space Station retire to their padded sleep pods, which have just enough room to fit the astronaut, a laptop mounted to a wall, and a few practical items. To prevent themselves from drifting through the station while catching some zero-g z’s, astronauts snuggle into a sleeping bag mounted to the wall of their sleep pod. As they start to slumber, their bodies relax and their arms drift out in front of them, making them look like floating zombies.

Absent from astronauts’ bedrooms, though, are pillows. In microgravity you don’t need one—you don’t even need to hold your head. Instead, it just naturally tips forward.

But just because pillows aren’t needed in space doesn’t mean that astronauts shouldn’t have them. A pillow is the ultimate token of comfort and home, a place to rest one’s head, be vulnerable, find peace. People bring their own pillows to hospitals as a way to import coziness to the coldness of a clinic. So why not bring one to the deep freeze of space? Future astronauts on long duration missions to Mars, which NASA estimates will take at least 1,000 days, might very much want such an evocative reminder of life on their home planet.

It’s considerations like these that keep Tibor Balint up at night, so to speak. As a principal human-centered designer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Balint spends his time looking for ways to incorporate art and design principles into human space endeavors. Now that we’re on the cusp, in space mission timescales, of sending a human to Mars, Balint believes that mission architects need to start catering to astronauts’ higher psychological needs. Enter the space pillow, or as Balint calls it, the space pillow system.

As detailed in a paper recently published in Acta Astronautica, Balint and his colleague Chang Hee Lee, an assistant professor at the Royal College of Art, sought to create an object that would provide comfort, reduce stress, and enhance the privacy of astronauts on a multiyear mission to the Red Planet. The pair ultimately landed on the pillow as their ideal “boundary object,” an item that sits at the crossroads of various disciplines and could spark conversations applicable to other facets of space life. So while astronauts might not physically need a pillow to sleep in space, Baliant says the act of designing a headrest allowed them to consider what space travelers might need beyond the basics of life support.

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For the entire history of space exploration, astronauts have never been more than a three-day journey from Earth. Whether on the ISS or the surface of the moon, they could maintain constant radio contact and, perhaps more important from a psychological standpoint, see their home planet. For the astronauts on the first mission to Mars, the situation will be remarkably different. Radio communication will be delayed by up to 20 minutes each way. When astronauts look out the windows of their spacecraft, they won’t see a sunrise over a blue marble, but the blackness of deep space. And rather than having a daily schedule planned to the minute, they will have quite a bit of downtime on their journey—time that could wreak psychological havoc on the unprepared. “In a way, you’re in solitary confinement for three years,” Balint says. “That’s why we need to start looking into these higher-level needs, because without them people will go crazy.”