New whitepaper: How to Build on the Moon, with commentary from Niki Werkheiser, former NASA Director of Technology Maturation, shaped by conversations with the former ISS DirectorNew whitepaper: How to Build on the Moon, with commentary from Niki Werkheiser, former NASA Director of Technology Maturation, shaped by conversations with the former ISS DirectorNew whitepaper: How to Build on the Moon, with commentary from Niki Werkheiser, former NASA Director of Technology Maturation, shaped by conversations with the former ISS Director
Book · Forthcoming

Space
Wombism

Civilizational infrastructure for the body off Earth

Foreword by Frank White · Stellar Amenities

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Central argument

The interiors we construct don't just shelter consciousness. They participate in constituting it, and a spacecraft is the limit case that makes this visible.

Space Wombism draws on Sloterdijk, McLuhan, and Baudrillard to argue that built environments are not neutral containers for human life, but active participants in shaping it. A claim that becomes hardest to ignore once the environment in question is a sealed vessel with no outside to fall back on.

Space Wombism: The Next Billion Years of Human Shelter reveals how spacecraft function as technological wombs. Protective environments that don't just sustain life but fundamentally transform human consciousness, culture, and society. As humanity becomes multiplanetary, we're creating the first artificial environments that completely mediate human existence, where every breath, drop of water, and social interaction occurs within technological systems.

Drawing from the author's space architecture expertise, this book examines how space habitats reshape identity, social structures, and our understanding of what it means to be human beyond Earth. The work explores the psychology of confinement, the emergence of space-specific cultures, and the philosophical implications of absolute technological dependence.

With a foreword by Frank White (author of The Overview Effect), the book bridges space technology with cultural theory, revealing how the design of space habitats will shape humanity's cosmic evolution. As climate change intensifies on Earth, the closed-loop thinking and protective design principles developed for space habitats offer frameworks for terrestrial sustainability challenges.

This circular journey, from Earth to space and back to Earth with a transformed perspective, may prove space habitation's most valuable contribution: not just enabling cosmic expansion, but providing new understanding of our relationship with the technological and natural systems that sustain all life.

"When the hatch closes, a boundary forms, not just physical but psychological. The space inside becomes 'here'; the space outside becomes 'there.' In Earth orbit, 'there' is the vacuum of space. On the Moon or Mars, 'there' is an atmosphere too thin to breathe, temperatures that would freeze blood, radiation that would damage DNA. The line between life and death becomes architectural."

Anastasia Prosina, Founder & Space Architect

For readers interested in

MIT Press proposal · Extended CV and two sample chapters submitted · Sign up for updates
Section · 01

Overview

Space Wombism is a philosophical framework developed over several years of essays and proposal drafts, arguing that constructed interiors constitute consciousness rather than merely housing it. The book traces this argument from Earth-bound architecture out to its most extreme test: a spacecraft, where there is no outside environment left to quietly do the work architecture usually delegates to it.

Section · 02

The framework

On Earth, a building's interior can get away with being a passive container, because the atmosphere, gravity, and biosphere outside are doing most of the actual work of keeping a person alive. Strip that background away, as a spacecraft does, and the interior has to take over everything the planet used to handle invisibly. The book argues that this isn't a special case unique to spaceflight; it's the condition that was always true of built space, just visible now because there's nowhere left to hide it.

Section · 03

Intellectual lineage

The argument draws on Peter Sloterdijk's spherology, Marshall McLuhan's media-as-extensions-of-man, and Jean Baudrillard's work on simulation, applying each to the specific problem of constructed interiors in space rather than treating them as purely philosophical or media-theoretical claims.

Section · 04

Why the spacecraft is the limit case

A house can be a bad house and its occupants will mostly survive it. A spacecraft cannot. That difference in stakes is what makes the spacecraft useful as a philosophical instrument: it forces the argument that interiors shape consciousness to be tested against consequences that are immediate, physical, and impossible to explain away.

Section · 05

Status

A finalized book proposal, including an extended CV and two sample chapters, has been submitted to MIT Press, with Justin Kehoe as the target acquiring editor. A second, Neufert-style reference book on architectural data and standards for space environments is also in early planning.