Image: NASA
A new era needs a new kind of lab
Humanity is moving off the planet. Commercial stations are being built, crews are returning to the Moon, and within twenty years more than a hundred people could be living and working in space at any moment. It is the most exciting time in human spaceflight since Apollo.
There is one part of this story that has not caught up. Rockets, capsules and stations have been reinvented. The technology that keeps people healthy in space has barely changed in sixty years. We think that is the single biggest opportunity in the space economy, and we started Stellar Amenities Lab to go after it.
The body is the frontier
Space changes the human body fast. Bones weaken, muscles shrink and the heart and eyes change, often within weeks. After six decades of human spaceflight, the mechanisms behind most of these changes are still open questions.
Every mission is a chance to learn how the body adapts to a new world. Today most of that knowledge is lost.
We want every mission to teach the next one. That means measuring the body continuously during flight, building habitats around what people actually need, and turning what we learn into technology crews can rely on.
How we work
Great crew health ideas tend to stall in the same place: past the lab, short of flight, somewhere between TRL 4 and TRL 6. Nobody was ever built to carry them across. We are.
We look for the gaps that matter most, build teams around them, and take each technology through testing on Earth, on zero-gravity flights and in orbit until it is ready to fly. Then we build a company around it. We build companies inside the Lab, and occasionally invest in outside teams working on the same problems.
We are a frontier lab, not a fund and not a consultancy. The work happens here, end to end.
Image: NASA
Join us
We are a small team of people who have built life support systems, designed crew vehicles and led technology maturation at NASA, and we are just getting started. Our first incubated companies are on the way, and we will share our research openly with everyone building the next stations and the first permanent home on the Moon.
If you want to help keep people healthy as they head out into the solar system, we would love to meet you.