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
Stellar Amenities Lab
Building the institution human spaceflight doesn't have yet.
A crew-health-first R&D lab. We mature the technologies NASA identifies but can no longer fund past early feasibility, then commercialize what we build and hold the equity ourselves.
Built on seven years of Stellar Amenities operating in semi-stealth consultancy mode, quietly running the market intelligence and NASA-facing engagements that surfaced this exact gap long before the Lab had a name.
-22%NASA civil servant cuts in 2025·-20%+ proposed FY2027 budget cut·The knowledge that built the crew side is leaving. The Lab is where it lands.
Our Approach
Find the gap. Mature the technology. Own what we build.
Roughly 22% of NASA's civil servant workforce is gone since 2025, with a further 20%+ budget cut proposed for FY2027, one of the leading reasons promising crew-health technology never reaches flight. Not because the science failed, but because no institution's job was ever to carry it across the mid-TRL gap.
01
Find the Gap
Sourced from documented NASA HRP and Artemis technology needs, plus relationships across program managers and technical networks, not just what's fundable this fiscal year.
02
Mature the Technology
Qualification and validation work through TRL 4 to 6, the exact range where funding drops off, tested on analog, parabolic, and orbital platforms.
03
Own What We Build
The Lab holds equity in what comes out the other side. Commercial consulting funds the early work. Equity in what we build is the compounding engine.
"I watched this happen for 25 years at NASA: promising crew-health and habitation technologies stall at TRL 4 to 6, with no institution built to carry them across."
Niki Werkheiser, former NASA Director of Technology Maturation, joining the Lab full-time
Why This, Why Now
The world right now
Commercial LEO Destinations are moving from concept to flight, NASA's own crew-health R&D capacity is shrinking, and the people who built the institutional judgment behind decades of human spaceflight are retiring without a formal place to hand that knowledge off.
The world we're building toward
A commercial human spaceflight industry where crew-health technology matures as reliably as any other engineering discipline, backed by an institution whose whole job is holding a technology's continuity for as long as it actually takes.
What's missing
An institution built specifically to hold a technology across the TRL 4-to-6 gap, the range where NASA centers run out of annual budget, university labs run out of grant cycle, and startups run out of a fund's ten-year window before the technology is flight-credible.
What others have tried
NASA centers fund early feasibility work well but can't carry a technology past the demonstration stage on annual appropriations. University labs produce strong research but lose momentum the moment a grant cycle ends. Startups can move fast but need a return inside a normal fund's window, a timeline this category of technology usually can't meet.
Why not SpaceX, or another prime
In a direct conversation with a SpaceX engineer, the company's own priorities were described plainly: "we don't have nearly the resources committed to the crew side yet," with "all efforts on the vehicle stuff" first, because "that side of it's never needed until we get the vehicle to work." Crew systems get treated as a bounded problem to solve later, not a parallel priority now. Other station builders show the same pattern, structure and launch first, human systems whenever there's time left over. That's not a criticism. It's a rational allocation of a finite engineering budget toward what gets a vehicle flying. It's also exactly why crew-health technology needs an institution whose whole job is the part everyone else is rationally deprioritizing.
What we do
Stellar Amenities' commercial consulting arm funds the Lab's early work the way Bell Labs' telephone monopoly once funded research with no obligation to prove itself on any particular quarter. The Lab matures technology through the gap other institutions can't hold, then owns equity in what it builds, turning patient capital into the actual mechanism that closes the gap, not just a description of the problem.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Alexander Gerst training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, the water-tank method MEK is built to improve on. Credit: NASA.
Product 01. MEK
Full-body haptic EVA training
A real force-feedback training platform, built in Sausalito, that trains astronauts for spacewalks better than the water-based methods NASA uses today. In conversation with Johnson and Marshall for Artemis integration; underwent a five-office coordinated review at NASA Marshall. The strategic path is acquisition by one of the primes as the Moon timeline compresses.
MEK is also its own intelligence layer: every training session generates force, motion, and biomechanical data on how a body actually moves under EVA load, a dataset that doesn't exist anywhere else and feeds directly back into suit and habitat design decisions.
Licensed semiconductor ultrasound-on-chip hardware paired with guided-acquisition software, letting a crew member with no sonography training capture diagnostic-quality images, since a trained sonographer is rarely available on a small crew. The body ages three to five times faster in orbit, and there's no good longitudinal dataset across the roughly 730 people who have flown. This closes that gap, on-board, and already underpins a closed commercial partnership with Vast and Oura on crew wellness technology.
The people who built crew health at NASA are leaving. We're building the institution that carries their knowledge across the gap they couldn't close alone.
