Introducing Stellar Amenities Lab

Meet Stellar Amenities Lab. A commercial frontier lab with the mission of keeping people alive and whole in the environments that were never meant to sustain them, starting with space.

We're pursuing this by owning the one step in a technology's life that determines whether it ever actually flies: the mid-TRL gap, roughly TRL 4 to 6, where promising crew-health and habitation research has historically stalled for lack of any institution built to carry it across. We mature it, we build it in-house, and we hold the equity in what comes out the other side: products we own, rather than deliverables handed off to a client.

For 25 years, our founding advisor watched this exact failure mode play out inside NASA. "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," says Niki Werkheiser, former NASA Director of Technology Maturation, who is joining the Lab full-time. That gap is only getting wider. NASA's civil servant workforce is down 22% since 2025, with a further 20%+ budget cut proposed for FY2027. The people who built the crew side of human spaceflight are leaving, and the knowledge they carry has nowhere to land unless someone builds that institution deliberately.

We believe the body itself is the layer everyone else has ignored. Space ages the human body three to five times faster than Earth does, and there is still no good longitudinal dataset across the roughly 730 people who have ever flown. We're closing that gap by licensing Butterfly Network's ultrasound chip to build spacecraft-embedded imaging. An intelligence layer for the human body in space, built into the habitat rather than requiring a crew member to operate a handheld device correctly under stress.

We envision a Lab that looks less like a consultancy and more like an institution: a place that sources technology gaps directly from documented NASA needs and its own relationships, matures them through the qualification work no one else will fund, validates them on analog, parabolic, and orbital platforms, and spins the results out as companies it holds equity in. Consulting fuels the early work. Equity in what we build is the compounding engine.

We're starting with two products already in motion. MEK is a full-body haptic EVA training platform, built in Sausalito, that trains astronauts for spacewalks with real force feedback instead of the water-tank methods NASA still relies on. It has been through a five-office coordinated review at NASA Marshall and is in conversation with Johnson and Marshall for Artemis integration. The intelligence layer is the second: the on-board imaging platform that turns the human body itself into a dataset worth having.

If you're excited to contribute to this mission, as a hire, an advisor, an investor, or a partner already building in this space, we'd love to meet you.