Tag: Space stations

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Business is looking up for space station designers

Illustration: Cutaway view of laboratory workspace on Starlab space station
This cutaway view shows the interior of the Starlab space station’s laboratory. (Starlab Illustration)

How do you design a living space where there’s no up or down? That’s one of the challenges facing Teague, a Seattle-based design and innovation firm that advises space companies such as Blue Origin, Axiom Space and Voyager Technologies on how to lay out their orbital outposts.

Mike Mahoney, Teague’s senior director of space and defense programs, says the zero-gravity environment is the most interesting element to consider in space station design.

“You can’t put things on surfaces, right? You’re not going to have tables, necessarily, unless you can attach things to them, and they could be on any surface,” he told me. “So, directionality is a big factor. And knowing that opens up new opportunities. … You could have, let’s say, two scientists working in different orientations in the same area.”

Over the next few years, NASA and its partners are expected to make the transition from the aging International Space Station to an array of commercial space stations — and Teague is helping space station builders get ready for the shift.

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Gravitics makes a $125M space station deal with Axiom

Illustration: Gravitics spacecraft in orbit
An artist's conception shows Gravitics' spacecraft in orbit. (Gravitics Illustration)

Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics says it has won a $125 million contract from Axiom Space to provide a pressurized spacecraft for Axiom’s yet-to-be-launched commercial space station.

The hardware would play a utility role by providing a variety of support services for Axiom Station.

Axiom Station’s first space module is being built by Thales Alenia Space. That habitation module would be attached to the International Space Station in the 2026 time frame, and when it’s time for the ISS to be retired, Axiom plans to detach its hardware to serve as a standalone orbital outpost.

Gravitics would help Axiom build out its orbital infrastructure. The startup, founded in 2021, offers a product line of spacecraft ranging in diameter from 3 meters (10 feet) to a Starship-sized 8 meters (26 feet). The spacecraft to be built for Axiom will be 4 meters (13 feet) in diameter, with its own propulsion system and power system.

Gravitics’ deal with Axiom points the way toward an ecosystem for building and operating commercial space stations.

“Axiom Space and Gravitics are working together to develop space infrastructure to enable a sustainable global space economy in low-Earth orbit,” Matt Ondler, president of Axiom Space, said today in a news release. “Our next-gen platform, Axiom Station, will provide new pathways to space for traditional space users and non-traditional industries. We are expanding commercial opportunities in space, from in-space manufacturing to technology demonstrations to research and innovative solutions that will advance civilization.”

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Exhibit celebrates space station dreams and realities

Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger in front of Museum of Flight's selfie station
Retired NASA astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger takes selfies at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

The dream of having people live and work in space didn’t start with billionaire Jeff Bezos, or even with rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. Instead, you’d have to look back at least as far as 1869 — a full century before humans walked on the moon.

That’s just one of the fun facts you’ll learn from the Museum of Flight’s new exhibition, “Home Beyond Earth,” which opens today.

Geoff Nunn, the museum’s adjunct curator for space history, said this exhibit is meant to provide fun as well as education in the subjects of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

“One of our goals was to go beyond the STEM of it, and really look at the underlying cultural connection and human fascination with living and working in space,” Nunn said. “Ultimately, we want everyone who comes through this exhibit, whether or not they’re interested in science and engineering, to think about how the space community is changing.”

The 1869 version of the space station dream serves as an example. Back then, Edward Everett Hale wrote “The Brick Moon,” a serialized novella about an artificial satellite that was built from bricks. The Museum of Flight’s team adapted an illustration from the story to create a 3D-printed model of the masonry moon, complete with tiny figures and palm trees sticking up from the top of the globe.

Other displays trace the evolution of the space station concept through the 1950s, when Walt Disney turned von Braun’s vision of a rotating space station into a TV show … the 1960s, when “2001: A Space Odyssey” picked up on the idea … the 1970s, when the Soviets and the Americans put up their first space stations … the 1980s and ’90s, when Russia’s Mir space station helped bridge the Cold War divide … leading up to the present-day era of the International Space Station.

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Gravitics will work with Space Force on space station tech

Illustration: Gravitics space station module in orbit
An artist's conception shows a Gravitics space station module in orbit. (Gravitics Illustration)

Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics says it will work with Rocket Lab USA and other partners to adapt its space station architecture for the U.S. Space Force under the terms of a $1.7 million contract.

The contract was awarded through the 2023 SpaceWERX Tactically Responsive Space Challenge, a competition that was conducted in partnership with Space Safari. Gravitics was among 18 companies that were fast-tracked for Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contracts.

Gravitics provided further details about the project today in a news release. The company said it plans to leverage its commercial space station product architecture to develop orbital platforms that will enable rapid response options for the U.S. Space Force.

“We are looking at all options to meet the mission on tactically relevant timelines. The Gravitics space station module offers an unconventional and potentially game-changing solution for TacRS [Tactically Responsive Space],” said Lt. Col. Jason Altenhofen, Space Safari’s director of operations. “As we look into the future, the innovative use of commercial technologies will be an important aspect to solving some of our toughest challenges.”

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Fiction Science Club

Get a reality check on plans to build cities in space

A scene from "For All Mankind" shows a fictional Martian city from above. (Credit: Sony Pictures / Apple TV+)

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may harbor multibillion-dollar dreams of sending millions of people to live on Mars, on the moon and inside free-flying space habitats — but a newly published book provides a prudent piece of advice: Don’t go too boldly.

It’s advice that Kelly and Zach Weinersmith didn’t expect they’d be giving when they began to work on their book, titled “A City on Mars.” They thought they’d be writing a guide to the golden age of space settlement that Musk and Bezos were promising.

“We ended up doing a ton of research on space settlements from just every angle you can imagine,” Zach Weinersmith says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “This was a four-year research project. And about two and a half years in, we went from being fairly optimistic about it as a desirable, near-term likely possibility [to] probably unlikely in the near term, and possibly undesirable in the near term. So it was quite a change. Slightly traumatic, I would say.”

The Weinersmiths found that there was precious little research into the potential long-term health effects of living on the moon or Mars — and zero research into the potential effects on human reproduction and development. Moreover, the legal uncertainties surrounding property rights in space seemed likely to lead to disputes that would tie diplomats and military planners in knots.

“In our effort to create Mars settlements to make a Plan B, to make ourselves safer as a species, are we actually lowering existential risk?” Zach says. “I think it’s absolutely unclear — and there’s a good argument that we might even increase it.”

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Fiction Science Club

Novelist charts a course for the future space frontier

Illustration: Clarke Station with moon in foreground
"Critical Mass" traces the construction of a huge space station just beyond the moon. (Illustration for Dutton / Penguin Random House)

If Jeff Bezos needs a blueprint for building a space station beyond the moon with ore from an asteroid, he just might want to start with “Critical Mass,” a newly published sci-fi novel by Daniel Suarez.

The 464-page book describes in detail how entrepreneurs, engineers and astronauts take advantage of a cache of material mined from an asteroid to create a giant, ring-shaped space station, a space-based solar power system, a mass driver for delivering resources from the moon and a nuclear-powered spaceliner. To add to the drama, they’re doing all this in the midst of a global climate crisis in the late 2030s.

Building space outposts and moving heavy industry off-Earth to preserve our home planet’s environment is an overarching theme in Bezos’ long-term space vision. “We want to go to space to save the Earth,” he said in 2016. “I don’t like the ‘Plan B’ idea that we want to go to space so we have a backup planet. … This is the best planet. There is no doubt. This is the one that you want to protect.”

Suarez agrees with Bezos’ sentiment, but not because the billionaire founder of Amazon and Blue Origin came up with the idea.. In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Suarez points out that Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, Bezos’ space mentor, had the idea first. “This is the idea of settling deep space by re-creating our biosphere in free space as opposed to settling another planet,” he says.

With “Critical Mass” and the other books in his Delta-V trilogy, Suarez aims to do what O’Neill’s 1970s-era mix of science fiction and fact, “The High Frontier,” did for the likes of Jeff Bezos. Suarez aims to get people thinking about how a space-based society could work.

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Gravitics raises $20M to build space station modules

Illustration: StarMax space station module in orbit
An artist’s conception shows Gravitics’ StarMax module in Earth orbit. (Gravitics Illustration)

A space venture called Gravitics has emerged from stealth with $20 million in seed funding and a plan to build space station modules at a 42,000-square-foot facility north of Seattle, in Marysville, Wash.

As NASA makes plans to phase out the International Space Station in the 2031 time frame, Gravitics and its backers are betting on a rush to launch commercial outposts to low Earth orbit. The operators of those outposts just might need subcontractors to provide the hardware.

Gravitics’ main offering will be a super-sized module known as StarMax. The general-purpose module would provide up to 400 cubic meters (14,000 cubic feet) of usable habitable volume — which represents nearly half of the pressurized volume of the International Space Station.

Multiple StarMax modules could be linked together in orbit like Lego blocks. “We are focused on helping commercial space station operators be successful,” Colin Doughan, Gravitics’ co-founder and CEO, said today in a news release. “StarMax gives our customers scalable volume to accommodate a space station’s growing user base over time. StarMax is the modular building block for a human-centric cislunar economy.”

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Orbital Reef space station wins role in sci-fi movie

Orbital Reef illustration
An artist’s conception shows the Orbital Reef space station. (Orbital Reef via Amazon)

The commercial space station that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has a hand in building, known as Orbital Reef. will be getting some Hollywood-level product placement years before it’s due to go into operation.

Blue Origin and the other partners in the Orbital Reef project today announced a cross-promotional deal with Centerboro Productions to portray the space outpost in an upcoming sci-fi movie titled “Helios.” The announcement was timed to coincide with this week’s International Astronautical Congress in Paris.

The movie is set in 2030, which is around the time Orbital Reef could become a reality — assuming that the funding from NASA and from commercial partners continues to flow.

“The film will tell the story of a spaceship, the Helios, and its crew during their urgent mission to the International Space Station,” a plot synopsis reads. “When a massive solar flare hits the station, it is up to astronomer and former NASA astronaut Jess Denver and Air Force Colonel Sam Adler to team up and save humanity.”

Orbital Reef is to be featured as a next-generation space station that serves as a critical resource for the Helios crew.

“We teamed up with Blue Origin to give moviegoers a thrilling but realistic depiction of the future of living and working in space and a coordinated response to a space weather emergency,” Patricia A. Beninati, who’s one of the film’s producers and writers as well as the president of Centerboro Productions, said in a news release.

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Jeff Bezos’ ventures team up on space station effort

Orbital Reef illustration
An artist’s conception shows the Orbital Reef space station. (Orbital Reef via Amazon)

Amazon and its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, say they’re joining forces with another company founded by Jeff Bezos to support the development of a commercial space station known as Orbital Reef.

Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is one of the leaders of the Orbital Reef project, along with Colorado-based Sierra Space. Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering and Arizona State University are also part of the consortium.

Last December, Orbital Reef won a $130 million award from NASA to move ahead with the design of an orbital outpost that could fill the gap when the International Space Station is retired in the 2030-2031 time frame. Two other teams — led by Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman — also won NASA funding to flesh out their space station concepts.

In a blog posting, AWS said it would provide services and technology tools to support Orbital Reef’s development from the engineering design phase to on-orbit networking and operations. Amazon would contribute its expertise in logistics to streamline delivery and inventory management of space station supplies.

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Universe Today

NASA details its plans for space station’s doom in 2031

International Space Station
The International Space Station stretches out in an image captured by astronauts during a survey in November 2021. (NASA Photo)

NASA says it plans to plunge the vestiges of the International Space Station into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo in early 2031, after passing the baton to commercial space stations.

In an updated transition report just delivered to Congress, the space agency detailed the endgame for the space station, which has been hosting international crews continuously since the year 2000 — and hinted at what its astronauts would be doing in low Earth orbit after its fiery destruction.

“The private sector is technically and financially capable of developing and operating commercial low-Earth-orbit destinations, with NASA’s assistance,” Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial space, said in a news release. “We look forward to sharing our lessons learned and operations experience with the private sector to help them develop safe, reliable, and cost-effective destinations in space.”

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