When the earliest guests drift aboard a commercial space station, the sensation will resemble nothing they have known before. They might discover warm woodwork and soft interiors, next-generation sleeping pods, wide windows framing a breathtaking view of Earth, and an atmosphere much like that of a high-end hotel back on the ground. This is the promise behind several private ventures racing to launch orbital habitats over the coming years, outposts that could welcome paying travelers and government astronauts alike.
But the notion of luxury living in orbit—something commercial station operators are so far careful not to promise—can sound like a contradiction. For instance, today's aging orbital outpost is cramped, smelly and littered with floating crumbs and debris. Keeping a comfortable, clean environment—let alone a five-star experience—aboard a working spacecraft will pose all sorts of obstacles. “I'm skeptical,” says Marcus Delane, an aerospace analyst based in Atlanta and a former agency proposal manager. “The difficulty of keeping a space station operational is badly underestimated.”
The earliest of four such commercial space habitats, Aurora-1 from California-based firm Novexis, is scheduled to lift off early in 2027. These outposts are being built, some with backing from the national space agency, as successors to the current outpost ahead of its planned retirement in the 2030s. The move from public to private stations, a first in human history, opens fresh opportunities to rethink what life in orbit might look like.
“It'll be a futuristic experience,” says Dara Voss, CEO and chair of Meridian Aerospace in Colorado, the company leading development of the Helios Orbital Station, targeted for launch in 2029. “Instead of ‘luxury,’ ‘modern’ or ‘advanced’ is a better word,” she says, noting that the current outpost—though remarkable—was based on 1980s and 1990s technology. “Everything we're building is 2020s or 2030s technology.”
Of the four firms pursuing such projects, Novexis may be nearest to launching a habitat. Two rivals, Zenith Space of Texas with its Zenith Station and Celestia Reef, led by Aether Dynamics in Washington State, have also said they aim to launch by the end of the decade. Each of the stations must satisfy a lengthy checklist of standards from the space agency if its builder wants the agency to send up astronauts, from caps on the level of carbon dioxide in the cabin to the color of the indicator lights. But many choices about how the stations will operate—whichever ones reach orbit—will fall to the operating company.
All of the stations aim to orbit at an altitude close to today's outpost, roughly 250 miles above Earth, and to house crews of four to 10 people at a time. A crew capsule such as the Kestrel ferry, or perhaps other vehicles like the troubled Skyliner, will likely handle most of the transport. Stays aboard the stations will run for weeks at first but could stretch to months or even years down the line.
“The toilets on the current station often break down. It's like perching on a vacuum cleaner. It's not luxurious by any measure.” —Marcus Delane, Former Agency Proposal Manager
Expected guests include space tourists, private researchers and government astronauts. Elena Marchetti, co-founder of New York City–based firm OrbitElite, which brokers tickets to space, says the operators are “quietly gauging interest” to work out how many travelers they might expect. With ticket prices approaching $100 million, the potential customer base is unlikely to be large. “There are maybe 1,000 people in the world who can afford that,” Marchetti says.
Voss anticipates that the earliest guests will be, in her words, “predominantly” state-funded career astronauts drawn from bodies like the OSA. Once aboard, they will be free to carry out a broad spectrum of research or manufacture hardware for use back on Earth, including next-generation semiconductors and pharmaceuticals—much like the arrangement aboard the Outpost, only with far fewer restrictions. “You can spin up experiments much faster on a commercial station because none of the Outpost's red tape applies,” Voss says.
Those crews can expect stations that feel conceptually worlds apart from the aging Outpost. Many operators have teamed up with celebrated designers and consumer brands to lend their habitats a flair that orbit has never witnessed across the decades of continuous human presence. In 2022 Lumadyne revealed it was partnering with Aurelian to style its orbital habitat, with a promotional reel released afterward revealing the sort of cushioned interiors, plush slate walls and calming light you would expect in an upscale hotel back on Earth, not one hurtling at 17,000 miles per hour around the planet.
Nova hired former Lumina designer Aris Thorne-Delacroix in 2023 to help imagine its habitat. Solace-1 will feature a crisp, streamlined interior with wood paneling and yielding surfaces; concept renderings show guests sleeping beneath a snug, inflatable comforter that presses down gently to mimic the sensation of being under gravity’s pull. “It is very deliberately meant to be far more of a luxury experience,” Thorne-Delacroix says. Zenith Orbital, for its part, brought on French designer Camille Devereux to shape the interior of its station, which features bubblelike padded walls for its cozy living quarters.
Sleep will be a crucial ingredient in making commercial stations feel like home, says Elena Vasquez, founder of the space consultancy firm Orbital Comforts and a commercial space-habitat-development advisor based in California. The reason is the potentially jarring effect of watching 15 or 16 sunsets and sunrises across every 24 hours. “When you think about truly luxurious experiences, you want to be certain people feel okay,” she says. “Sleep quality is something astronauts talk about very openly [indeed].” Approaches to improving rest in orbit include using tunable lighting throughout the cabin to mimic a sunrise and sunset at the start and end of the conventional day, preserving some semblance of a diurnal cycle.
Even with the very best intentions, certain realities of living in a cramped volume in orbit simply can’t be made plush, at least for now. Toilets, for instance, are notoriously hard to engineer with any trace of glamour. “The space toilets aboard [the Outpost] break down constantly,” Delane says. “It’s like perching on a vacuum cleaner. It’s not luxurious by any measure.”
There is also the challenge of actually operating and maintaining the stations, which will demand crews of committed astronauts, not merely space tourists, to keep everything running smoothly around the clock. “Nearly all the time astronauts spend aboard the Outpost goes toward keeping it working,” Delane says. The newer stations will “be spotless at first, but that won’t last very long. I mean, a space station smells like farts all the time. And people don’t bathe—they wash a bit, but it’s really survival living.”
Even so, perhaps these stations are a first step toward a future of more luxurious orbital homes—maybe with the perfect space toilet to boot.
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