How to design a space station: Meet the Seattle company that’s helping define the look of the final frontier
How do you design a living space when there is no top or bottom? That’s one of the challenges facing Teague, a Seattle-based company and innovation firm that advises space companies like Blue Origin, Axiom Space and Voyager Technologies on how to deploy space probes.
Mike Mahoney, Teague’s senior director of space and defense programs, says the zero-gravity environment is a very interesting aspect to consider in the design of the space station.
“You can’t put things on top, right? You can’t have tables, really, unless you can attach things to them, and they can be in any position,” he told GeekWire. “So, orientation is a big factor. And knowing that opens up new possibilities. … You could be, say, two scientists working in different ways in the same place.”
In the next few years, NASA and its partners are expected to transition from the aging International Space Station to more commercial space — and Teague is helping space station builders prepare for the transition.
Space is one of the new frontiers of the company which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Teague is best known for helping to design the interiors of Boeing airplanes as well as the first Polaroid camera and Microsoft’s first Xbox gaming console.
In the 1980s, Teague helped Boeing and NASA with their plans for the Space Station Freedom, an orbiting project that did not land but eventually evolved into the International Space Station. Teague also collaborated with NASA on a 3D printed replica of the Mars habitat, known as the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog.
These days, Teague focuses on interior designs for commercial spaceships, a business opportunity that utilizes the company’s traditional expertise in aircraft design.
Mahoney said Teague has been working with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space business on various projects for more than a decade. The first project was the New Shepard suborbital rocket ship, which debuted in 2015.
“We worked with their engineering team to design the space experience inside the New Shepard space capsule,” said Mahoney. “All the interior parts you see come together, from the lines to the lighting. We created a vision for the user experience of the displays as well.”
Teague also worked with Blue Origin on the design elements of the Orbital Reef space station and the Blue Moon lunar lander. “We were involved in designing the look and feel of the cars,” Mahoney said. “In some cases, we designed and built mockups that were used for astronaut operations and exploration. How do we navigate the legs of the moon? How do we prepare toolboxes on the surface of the moon?”
Other space station initiatives that have benefited from Teague’s input include Axiom Space (which also brought in Philippe Starck as a big-name designer) and Starlab Space, a joint venture between Voyager Technologies and Airbus.
Starlab recently unveiled a three-story model of its space station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. The mockup is built so it can be reconfigured to show the tweaks designers want to make to the space station structure, before launch or even years after launch.
“One of the things that has helped the most in this development process has been working with Teague, because you have to have a good idea of how to put this very large volume in order to be able to increase the efficiency of the team,” said Tim Kopra, a former NASA astronaut who now works as the chief human exploration officer at Voyager Technologies.
Kopra compared the Starlab station to a three-story condo. “The first floor is like the ground floor of a large building with infrastructure,” he said, “it has our life support systems, airplanes and software, toilets, a hygiene station – which includes both a toilet and a cleaning station – and exercise equipment.”
The second floor serves as a laboratory and work area, with a glove box, refrigerator, centrifuge, microscope and a number of storage racks and lockers. “We are very focused on four different industries: semiconductors, life sciences, pharmaceuticals and material sciences,” Kopra said.
He said the third floor will be “a place people will enjoy … because Deck 3 has our crew quarters, our galley table, our windows and more exploration capacity.”
The garage table is a good example of how zero-gravity interior design differs from terrestrial models. “There are no seats,” said Kopra. “Like on the ISS, all you need is a place to connect your feet. There are small design elements, like where do you put the hand rail, and how long is the table?” (He said the designers haven’t decided whether the table should be round or square.)
Kopra said another key to his design was to use the station’s capacity, and astronauts’ time, as efficiently as possible. “Time is very important to the ISS. They calculate that crew time can be $135,000 an hour,” he said. “Ours will be a fraction of that, but it shows how important it is to be efficient during travel.”
Starlab is designed to maximize efficiency. “We have a really cool design where the middle has a hatchway that goes through all three stories,” he said. “So, imagine if it was a fire station, you would have a pole going from floor to floor. We don’t need a fire pole.
Mahoney said human-centered design will be more important for commercial space stations than it was for the ISS.
“In the past, space stations were designed primarily for professionally trained, post-military astronauts,” he said. “Now we’re going to have different people there. … How do we think about how researchers and scientists will use these spaces? How do we think about astronauts who are not independent professionals? As the International Space Station retires, how do these companies step in to fill the space, serving NASA but also a lot of these new customers?”
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A three-story replica of the Starlab space station is housed inside a building at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. (Photo by Starlab) -
An interior view of the Starlab Mockup highlights the large viewing windows and emergency equipment. (Photo by Starlab) -
The Internal Payload Laboratory inside the Starlab mockup has a glove box, cold storage, an observation bench and a work bench. (Photo by Starlab) -
Level 3 of the Starlab mockup includes the crew quarters, galley and observation decks. Starlab Space’s partners include Hilton and Journey, the group behind Sphere in Las Vegas. (Photo by Starlab)
When will commercial space stations come in? The answer to that question is up in the air.
Last year, NASA overhauled its process for releasing more money to develop commercial space stations. The revised plan was intended to give our commercial partners a better chance of placing their extra-orbital facilities by 2030, the scheduled retirement date of the International Space Station.
But NASA has been slow to follow through on the revised plan, which has raised concerns in Congress. Late last month, the space agency said it was still working to “align acquisition timelines with national space policy and broader operational goals.” Now some lawmakers are asking NASA to reconsider its plan to remove the ISS in the 2030-2031 period.
The space station’s replacement timeline may be changing, but Mahoney and other space station designers are still running the course — and taking the long view.
“We may not know yet how this space station will be used 20 years from now,” said Mahoney. “How do we start to future-proof and build a system within that that’s modular and flexible, so we can add technology and add systems, or be able to set it up in different ways? … Those are the kinds of things we’re thinking about designing.”
