Persistent Memory as Mission-Critical Infrastructure for Long-Duration Spaceflight: Addressing Continuity Burden in Isolated Human-AI Systems

Framework preprint presenting CAMA (Circular Associative Memory Architecture) as mission-critical infrastructure for crew psychological health during long-duration spaceflight. Applies continuity burden, introduced in the author's earlier work, as a proposed measurable construct quantifying the cumulative cognitive and emotional cost of stateless AI interaction in isolated environments. Identifies four failure modes of stateless AI in spaceflight contexts: slow-onset behavioral drift, compounding interpersonal conflict, cumulative disclosure fatigue, and false-positive stability assessment. Presents a worked scenario demonstrating longitudinal intervention capability across a 30-day Mars transit simulation. Proposes preliminary operationalization of continuity burden through psychometric instruments (Continuity Burden Inventory, NASA TLX subscales) and behavioral proxies. Includes risk-mitigation matrix, counterargument analysis, empirical performance data from a working prototype (52,622 stored memories), and proposed analog trial parameters. Paper 1 of 4 in the Applied Persistent Memory Series. Changes in version 3.0 (September 2026) Abstract, Sections 1 and 2.3: Earth to Mars signal delay corrected from 4 to 24 minutes each way (8 to 48 round trip) to up to 22 minutes each way, peaking at 21 to 22 minutes while the crew is at Mars or has just departed; solar conjunction disruption corrected from about two weeks to days to several months. Abstract and Section 1: CIMON and CMO-DA are no longer described as stateless as a matter of fact; the text now says public descriptions of these systems do not describe memory of prior interactions. The abstract now says this paper applies continuity burden, which the author introduced in an earlier paper. Section 3.3: the worked example's 18-day lead is corrected to 6 days (Day 24 against the Day 30 questionnaire). Section 5 and Table 2: mitigations are labeled Implemented or Proposed, checked against the CAMA code as of March 26, 2026. Contradiction detection, multi-user boundaries, decaying weight for distressing content, and excluding personal-only disclosures from ground summaries are proposed, not built. Section 6.1: notes that assigning one team to each condition confounds team with condition. Section 7.1: CAMA has run since March 2026, seeded with a chat history that begins in January 2025, not since early 2024. Storage now reports the 522 MB database, about 10 KB per memory, and the crew storage estimate shows its assumptions and comes to roughly 13 GB. References: Landon et al. replaced with Dev et al. (2025); Morabito replaced with McBrayer, Chai and Judd (2022); Whitmire et al. replaced with Smith et al. (2023); Gaggioli corrected to Pagnini (2024); Bowers author and date added; CIMON source replaced with DLR (2019); Distilinfo replaced with Kelly (2025), Google Cloud Blog; Resnick corrected to Patel, N.V. (2020); self-citation DOI corrected to 10.5281/zenodo.19052129; Zhang corrected to Hu et al. (2025); Stuster (2010) is now cited by its experiment number (01-E104) and NASA Technical Reports Server record (20100026549). The argument, structure, and conclusions are unchanged.