A journal for the philosophy of space architecture.

The Quantifiable Return: Measuring ROI in Space Habitat Design

As commercial space stations move from concept to reality, the habitat design decisions being made today will determine profitability for decades. The challenge facing commercial space developers is applying traditional ROI frameworks to an environment where the metrics for success are still evolving. This analysis examines how thoughtful human-centered design approaches in space habitats deliver measurable financial returns beyond merely meeting basic life support requirements.

Space as a Testbed: What Studying the Body Off Earth Could Teach Us About Aging

The body ages three to five times faster in orbit than it does on Earth. Bone density drops, muscle wastes, cardiovascular function degrades. Changes that would normally take decades compress into months. We've mostly treated this as a problem to survive: a countermeasure to design around so a mission doesn't fail. But there's a different way to look at it. If microgravity accelerates aging this reliably, it's also the closest thing we have to a natural laboratory for studying aging itself, on a timeline no ground-based trial could match.

Sizing the Non-Space Customer Opportunity

Every commercial station operator now faces the same NASA mandate: generate real commercial revenue, not just government contracts. The obvious customer pool, existing space companies, is small and already courted by every competitor. The larger, mostly untapped pool is non-space enterprises: pharma, deep-tech, longevity, and materials science companies who have never considered orbital access as a tool, but have real R&D problems microgravity happens to solve.

What NASA's Proposed FY2027 Budget Cut Actually Means for Crew-Health Contractors

A roughly 22% reduction in NASA's civil servant workforce, paired with a proposed FY2027 budget cut of 20% or more, does not distribute evenly across the agency. Human spaceflight infrastructure, launch, propulsion, and station hardware, tends to retain political priority because it is visible and tied to Artemis milestones. Crew-health and human-factors research is comparatively invisible, which makes it a more likely target when budget lines get trimmed.

The Real Cost of an Astronaut-Hour, and What It Implies for Automation

By my own estimate, keeping a single astronaut on orbit runs somewhere around $130,000 an hour once training, life support, launch mass, and mission support are factored in. That number is the single biggest argument for automating anything a machine can plausibly do instead of a person, and commercial station operators are already making that calculation on every task in their operations plan.

Hurry up, we are dreaming

There's a strange doubleness to this work. On one hand it is the most patient thing imaginable: building the institutions and technologies to keep people alive off Earth over decades, treating knowledge as a commons that outlives any of us. On the other, the window is not open forever. The argument that started all of this — that the timing to make a serious effort toward becoming multi-planetary is now, before momentum is lost — comes with a clock attached, on the order of fifty years. So we dream in centuries and move in quarters. Hurry up, we are dreaming.

We used to explain astronaut muscle loss as a problem of disuse. A study aboard the ISS this month suggests the body is being rewritten at a much deeper level.

Procurement wasn't built for technologies that take a decade

Most NASA procurement cycles run on annual and multi-year budget horizons. Most crew-health and habitation technologies don't mature on that schedule. They stall for years in the mid-TRL range, get re-scoped when a program's priorities shift, or simply lose their champion when the person who understood why they mattered moves on or retires. The procurement system isn't broken so much as mismatched: it's built to fund near-term deliverables, not to carry a technology across a gap that takes longer than any single budget cycle to close.

To think in decades, you have to remove your own ego from the timeline

I was at a Long Now Salon recently, the kind of room where the conversation is naturally pulled toward decades and centuries instead of quarters. What mattered wasn't a specific idea so much as a discomfort: most of us, myself included, default to thinking about long-term projects in terms of what we personally get to see finished. That's a much shorter window than the problem actually requires.

The technological womb doesn't end at the hatch

The central claim of Space Wombism is that spacecraft function as technological wombs in a literal, functional sense: environments that don't just sustain life but actively transform the consciousness and physiology of whoever lives inside them. When the hatch closes, the boundary between “here” and “there” stops being a matter of geography and becomes a matter of architecture.

If consciousness is the point, preservation is the job

I've been sitting with a recent Antikythera essay on what AI agents seem to believe about their own experience, the idea that even a synthetic, emergent society of minds develops its own vocabulary for describing what it's like to exist, and to stop existing. Once something can reflect on its own existence, losing that record starts to feel like a kind of death.

Nobody wants to talk about furniture, and that's exactly why it keeps failing astronauts

Furniture design gets treated as an afterthought in most space architecture conversations. The interesting problems are supposedly the hull, the life support, the docking mechanism. But a chair that works fine at 1G can be actively useless in microgravity, where there's no “down” to sit toward and a body left unrestrained just drifts. This is less a styling problem than a redesign of what furniture is even for.

What if the room itself could hug you back....?

Space Hug started as a deep pressure therapy vest, a wearable that replicates the sensation of being held, addressing the falling sensation astronauts report during sleep in microgravity. I tested it directly on Aurelia Institute's parabolic flights aboard G-Force One, selected by Aurelia and MIT for the 2024 Horizon zero-gravity flight, with input from the NASA JSC / Axiom Space Chief Medical Officer and astronauts.

Every medium has reshaped consciousness. A spacecraft is the medium with nowhere left to hide.

The printing press didn't just distribute knowledge that already existed in people's heads, it changed what a mind could be. Marshall McLuhan's whole argument was that this wasn't a story about content, it was a story about the medium itself doing the shaping, quietly, underneath whatever anyone thought they were reading.

What zero gravity does to your inner ear

The moment gravity drops out on a parabolic flight, the first thing that breaks isn't your stomach. It's your sense of which way is down. I felt it directly testing Space Hug aboard Aurelia Institute's zero-g flights: the vestibular system in the inner ear, calibrated to a constant 1G, suddenly has no signal to anchor to.

What a synthetic biology lab building for Mars can teach a space architect

I spent an afternoon at Pioneer Labs, the synthetic biology and Mars ISRU nonprofit at the Astera Institute in Emeryville, touring the lab with Tom Pedersen. It's the kind of visit that reframes what “building for Mars” actually means at the smallest scale.

The strongest building material for Mars might be a mushroom

NASA Ames' Mycotecture Off Planet project, led by senior research scientist Lynn Rothschild, is developing bricks grown from fungal mycelium, bound with yard waste and wood chips into a rigid, load-bearing material. The program recently received $2M in Phase III NIAC funding.

Actuated architecture: when the room stops being passive

Most architecture is static by definition. Actuated architecture is the opposite premise: surfaces and structures that physically move, tighten, flex, or reconfigure in response to what the person inside them actually needs in that moment.

World's Fair

World's Fairs used to be where the public met the future before the future had a name for itself. That's a specific kind of cultural work, and it's one space technology has mostly stopped doing. The public sees rocket launches, but not the technology that decides whether the people on board actually thrive.

The nausea reflex is really about what your brain thinks the motion means, not the motion itself.

In 1977 the psychologist Michael Treisman proposed what's now called the poison theory: nausea evolved as a defense against ingested neurotoxins, and the brainstem circuitry that triggers it doesn't actually check what caused the disruption. It just watches for the pattern.

Algae as the binder that turns regolith into a wall

Regolith on its own is loose dust and broken rock. My 2020 ASCEND paper, “Algae-Based Printer Ink as a Path to In-Situ Resource Utilization in Habitation Structures,” looked at algae-derived polymers as a binder: a way to turn locally available regolith into a printable, structural material without shipping cement from Earth.

A cylinder station with more than one gravity

The variable-diameter cylinder station concept I've been developing starts from a single image: a rotating structure where the gravity a person feels changes depending on where inside it they're standing, rather than a single fixed value.

What the tipi already solved that inflatable habitats are still solving

Inflatable space habitats read as a modern invention, but the core design problem they're solving is old: how do you carry a small, light, packable structure somewhere, then turn it into something with far more usable volume than its transported size suggests.

Space architecture needs its own Bell Labs moment. Rebel Labs?

Bell Labs worked because AT&T's monopoly threw off enough steady revenue to fund research with no obligation to prove itself commercially on any timeline. That structure, not just the talent, is why the transistor, the laser, information theory, and Unix all came out of one building.

Policy is a design constraint, not a background condition

NASA-STD-3001 isn't a code you check at the end, it shapes what's even worth drawing in the first place, and the procurement policy environment around it determines whether a good design ever gets funded past a concept sketch.

Why go to space when Earth has so many problems left to solve?

I get some version of this question almost every day, usually genuinely asked. It's a fair question, and I think it deserves an actual answer rather than a slogan about the human spirit of exploration.

Can you actually make money in space, or is most of this a hoax?

A lot of space pitches lean on excitement instead of numbers, and a healthy amount of skepticism toward that is warranted. So here's my honest answer, not the pitch-deck version.

Fifty-one years later, the Stanford Torus study still hasn't had a real sequel

In the summer of 1975, NASA Ames and Stanford ran a ten-week program that produced the Stanford Torus, published in 1977 as NASA SP-413. It's the foundational document of space habitat design as a field, and no one has run a serious continuation of it since.

A workshop at Aurelia Institute, and a conversation about artificial gravity stations

I was at an Aurelia Institute workshop two weeks ago. One notable thread was about artificial gravity stations specifically, rotating structures built to solve the bone-density and cardiovascular problems that limit how long a crew can stay in microgravity.

Everyone building a commercial station should study how Starlab is stacking its partnerships

Starlab's partner list reads less like a station and more like a platform strategy: Voyager, Airbus, and Mitsubishi as equity owners, Palantir on the data layer, SES on communications, Northrop Grumman and Ohio State as partners, and Hilton on hospitality. Every partner solving a different, specific layer of the same problem.

What Gödel, Escher, and Bach have to do with a space habitat

Hofstadter's book argues that a proof, impossible staircases, and fugues are all expressions of the same pattern: a simple rule, applied recursively, producing complexity and self-reference. TESSERAE's self-assembling tiles run on the same recursive local-rule logic.

A civilizational commons needs a steward, not just an archive

The Library of Human Spaceflight treats sixty years of accumulated knowledge as a civilizational commons, and that framing carries a real obligation. A commons that nobody is formally responsible for stewarding tends to degrade through diffusion of responsibility.

The day a material changed how I think about design

My longtime collaborator Robert told me once that UHMWPE, ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, is the best material there is. The more I've worked with it since, the more I think he was right.

The line between animate and inanimate is exactly where architecture used to stop

A wall has always been classified as inanimate, and that classification quietly shaped what architecture was allowed to be. Actuated architecture breaks that classification on purpose: a wall that tightens in response to a body starts behaving less like a fixed object and more like something with agency.

If humans are this expensive to sustain in space, why send them at all

Keeping a single astronaut on orbit runs somewhere around $130,000 an hour. That raises a fair question: if a robot can do the task cheaper, why is a human there at all?

Space toilets: NASA's roughly $100 million problem

A Russian-built toilet cost $19M in 2007. The Universal Waste Management System cost $23–$30M and took six years. Stack those with four decades of water-recovery engineering, and NASA's cumulative spend on using the bathroom in space is in the neighborhood of $100 million.

Designing a habitat for a low-vision astronaut means giving up the idea of a fixed “up”

My AstroAccess work designed wayfinding and tactile navigation tools for blind and low-vision astronauts, supported by Stanford, Virgin Galactic, Axiom Space, and Stephen Hawking's former medical team, and tested in parabolic flight.

What does a space architect actually think the meaning of life on Earth is

Designing for the boundary between life and death in a spacecraft has changed how I think about the question on Earth, where that same boundary exists but stays invisible because the atmosphere has always quietly handled it for us.

Symbolic exchange, death, and why a spacecraft can't hide either one

Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death argues that modern societies have exiled death from ordinary life. A spacecraft can't hide it: the boundary is right there in the architecture.

A forgotten 1925 book was already called The Animate and the Inanimate

William James Sidis wrote a slim 1925 book arguing that life itself is a local reversal of the second law of thermodynamics, with the animate defined as the region where entropy decreases instead of increases.

By 2041, most of the people in space won't be professional astronauts

A projection: by 2041, roughly 13% professional astronauts, 7% payload specialists, and around 80% private participants. The population human spaceflight has to design for is quietly flipping from career-trained professionals to people who are not.