Image: NASA
Summary
Stellar Amenities Lab welcomes the National Security Science and Technology Strategy and its recognition of crewed spaceflight enablers and biotechnologies for space applications as critical and emerging technologies. We are a commercial lab that matures crew health and habitation technology from the prototype stage to flight readiness.
These comments draw on our founder’s work this fall as one of the inaugural Future Fellows at Evermay, in Washington, DC. During the residency, Anastasia Prosina has met with people across federal agencies, Congress-facing policy organizations and research institutions to understand how crew health and habitation technology is funded, bought and regulated, and where it stalls.
Our comments focus on one point. Naming a technology a national priority will only change outcomes if the funding behind it is reliable and reaches the stage where crew health technology stalls today: the gap between TRL 4 and TRL 6.
Background
Human physiology degrades in microgravity on a timescale with no terrestrial equivalent. Bone mineral density declines at rates measured monthly instead of per decade, and muscle mass and cardiovascular conditioning fall within weeks. After sixty years of human spaceflight, the mechanisms behind most of these changes remain unresolved.
The technologies that could address them often exist. Research grants fund concepts through publication, and flight programs buy qualified hardware on fixed schedules. The maturation work in between has few dedicated owners, so promising systems stall before they fly.
Recommendation 1: Fund the middle of the pipeline
The strategy directs agencies toward public-private partnerships for early and mid-stage development. We recommend that this guidance name the TRL 4 to 6 range explicitly for crewed spaceflight enablers, and that agencies use milestone payments tied to qualification steps rather than one-time awards.
Recommendation 2: Make funding predictable
Qualifying crew health hardware takes years and depends on access to analog sites, parabolic flights and orbital platforms. Funding that starts and stops with each budget cycle makes that work impossible to plan. We recommend multi-year commitments and advance purchase commitments, so that a qualified system has a buyer waiting when it is ready.
Recommendation 3: Protect crew health data
The strategy treats Americans’ biometric and health data as an asset to protect. Crew health data from altered gravity is among the rarest data of this kind. We recommend clear rules for how it is collected, stored and shared, so that a domestic record of how the body performs in space can be built safely.
Conclusion
Keeping crews healthy on long missions is now a matter of national interest. Reliable funding that reaches the middle of the pipeline is what will turn that priority into systems that fly. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss these comments further, in Washington or at Evermay.