NASA Sees Key Progress on Starlab Commercial Space Station

As NASA continues its transition toward a commercial low Earth orbit marketplace, an agency-supported commercial space station, Starlab, recently completed five development and design milestones. Starlab’s planned design consists of a service module and a habitat that will be launched to orbit on a single flight.

The milestones, part of a NASA Space Act Agreement awarded in 2021, focused on reviews of Starlab’s preliminary design and safety, as well as spacecraft mockup and procurement plans. Each milestone provides NASA insight into the company’s development progress.

“As we work toward the future of low Earth orbit, these milestones demonstrate Starlab’s dedication to building a commercial space station that can support human life and advance scientific research,” said Angela Hart, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “Both the insight shared by Starlab and the expertise shared by NASA are critical to future mission success.”

Starlab recently completed a preliminary design and safety review of its station’s architecture and systems. The company now will begin detailed design and hardware development, culminating in a critical design review later this year. Critical design reviews are an important step in a station’s development, assessing design maturity before proceeding with fabrication and assembly.

Starlab also has begun construction of a full-scale, high-fidelity mockup of the station. The mockup, which will be housed in the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at NASA Johnson, will be used for human-in-the-loop testing, during which participants perform day-in-the-life walkthroughs and evaluate the interior design, crew training, procedure development, hardware checks, and in-flight issue resolution.

In addition, Starlab completed reviews of the system design architecture, procurement plan, and Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft docking system design. In 2023, Northrop Grumman teamed up with Starlab to provide cargo logistics services and engineering consultation to support the commercial space station. These reviews included design configuration updates of solar arrays, docking ports, crew quarters, and more.

NASA supports the design and development of multiple commercial space stations through funded and unfunded agreements. Following the design and development phase, NASA plans to procure services from one or more companies as part of its strategy to become one of many customers for low Earth orbit stations.

Learn more about commercial space stations at:

www.nasa.gov/commercialspacestations

Keep Exploring

Discover More Topics

Commercial Space Stations

Low Earth Orbit Economy

Commercial Space

Humans In Space

Powered by WPeMatico

Get The Details…
Ana Guzman

NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers

Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help your career? To find out, we asked participants in NASA’s Exoplanet Watch project about their experiences. In this project, amateur astronomers work together with professionals to track planets around other stars.

First, we heard from professional software programmers. Right away, one of them told us about getting a new job through connections made in the project.

“I decided to create the exoplanet plugin, [for citizen science] since it was quite a lot of manual work to check which transits were available for your location. The exoplanet plugin and its users got me in contact with the Stellar group… Through this group, I got into contact with a company called OurSky and started working for them… the point is, I created a couple of plugins for free and eventually got a job at an awesome company.”

Another participant talked about honing their skills and growing their confidence through Exoplanet Watch.

“There were a few years when I wasn’t actively coding. However, Exoplanet Watch rekindled that spark…. Participating in Exoplanet Watch even gave me the confidence to prepare again for a technical interview at Meta—despite having been thoroughly defeated the first time I tried.”

Teachers and teaching faculty told us how Exoplanet Watch gives them the ability to better convey what scientific research is all about – and how the project motivates students! 

“Exoplanet Watch makes it easy for undergraduate students to gain experience in data science and Python, which are absolutely necessary for graduate school and many industry jobs.”

“Experience with this collaborative work is a vital piece of the workforce development of our students who are seeking advanced STEM-related careers or ongoing education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) fields after graduation… Exoplanet Watch, in this way, is directly training NASA’s STEM workforce of tomorrow by allowing CUNY (The City University of New York) students to achieve the science goals that would otherwise be much more difficult without its resources.”

One aspiring academic shared how her participation on the science team side of the project has given her research and mentorship experience that strengthens her resume. 

“I ended up joining the EpW team to contribute my expertise in stellar variability… My involvement with Exoplanet Watch has provided me with invaluable experience in mentoring a broad range of astronomy enthusiasts and working in a collaborative environment with people from around the world. … Being able to train others, interact in a team environment, and work independently are all critical skills in any work environment, but these specific experiences have also been incredibly valuable towards building my portfolio as I search for faculty positions around the USA.”

There are no guarantees, of course. What you get out of NASA citizen science depends on what you put in. But there is certainly magic to be found in the Exoplanet Watch project.  As one student said:

“Help will always be found at Hogwarts, to those who need it.” Exoplanet Watch was definitely Hogwarts for me in my career as an astronomer!”

For more information about NASA and your career, check out NASA’s Surprisingly STEM series highlighting exciting and unexpected jobs at NASA, or come to NASA Career Day, a virtual event for students and educators. Participants must register by September 4, 2025. The interactive platform will be open from September 15-19, with live panels and events taking place on September 18.

^{Exoplanet Watch volunteer Bryan Martin}

^{Credit: Bryan Martin}

Explore More

4 min read

NASA SCoPE Summer Symposium Celebrates Early Career Scientists and Cross-Team Collaboration

Article


24 hours ago

4 min read

Linking Satellite Data and Community Knowledge to Advance Alaskan Snow Science

Article


2 days ago

2 min read

Hubble Snaps Galaxy Cluster’s Portrait

Article


5 days ago

Powered by WPeMatico

Get The Details…

Ejection Mechanism Design for the SPEED Test Architecture Challenge

The The Stratospheric Projectile Entry Experiment on Dynamics (SPEED), a two-stage stratospheric drop test architecture, is currently under development to bridge the state-of-the-art gap that many NASA flagship missions require to reduce system risk and enable more optimized designs via margin reduction. To do this, a two-stage vehicle will drop from a high-altitude balloon and use the first stage (an LV-Haack cone aeroshell) to accelerate the sub-scale test model to supersonic conditions. The onboard avionics will then release the test model into freestream flow at the proper altitude in Earth’s atmosphere for dynamic Mach scaling to the full-scale flight trajectory. SPEED leverages low-cost methods of manufacturing such as 3D printing and laser/water-jet cutting to enable 8 or more two-stage vehicles to be dropped in a single test, making the science-to-dollar density much higher than any current ground-test facility NASA has at its disposal. The goal is to develop a robust ejection system that can reliably introduce the test models into supersonic flow with a tight variance on initial condition perturbation. The separation system must be capable of handling a range of initial angle-of-attacks, keep the test model secure in the first stage during take-off and descent, and eject the test model in such a way that it does not linger behind the first stage and be affected by the resulting wake. As current ejection system designs are conceptual, complex, and untested, NASA is looking for alternative ideas that can be incorporated into the design of their next iteration of SPEED flight vehicles to increase system reliability. We are challenging the public to design innovative concepts for a separation mechanism that can be used to assess NASA and commercial reentry vehicle stability.

Award: $7,000 in total prizes

Open Date: July 14, 2025

Close Date: September 8, 2025

For more information, visit: https://grabcad.com/challenges/ejection-mechanism-design-for-the-speed-test-architecture

Powered by WPeMatico

Get The Details…
Sarah Douglas

NASA Funds Early Career Employee Research

Sylvie Crowell, a materials researcher at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, has received a NASA Early Career Initiative (ECI) award for a research proposal titled “Lunar Dust Reduction through Electrostatic Adhesion Mitigation (L-DREAM).” The research focuses on developing a passive lunar dust mitigation coating for solar cells and thermal control surfaces. 

Operated under the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate, the award will fund Crowell’s research in fiscal year 2026, beginning Oct. 1, 2025.  

NASA’s ECI is a unique opportunity for the best and brightest of NASA’s early career researchers to lead hands-on technology development projects. The initiative aims to invigorate NASA’s technological base and best practices by partnering early career NASA leaders with external innovators. 

Powered by WPeMatico

Get The Details…
Kelly M. Matter

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4597-4599: Wide Open Spaces

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator, Framework

Earth planning date: Friday, July 11, 2025

Imagine this vista as the view out your office window to start your workday. Your natural tendency would be to grab your camera and photograph as much of the view as possible. Curiosity was lucky enough to find herself in this situation today after a successful drive of about 61 meters (about 200 feet) on Wednesday, and the science team operating Curiosity wasted no time papering the scene with mosaics.
Between Mastcam and ChemCam, we planned 105 images across the scene. Those images will capture the structures underpinning the boxwork ridges we are driving toward, smaller-scale fractures in the near field that might be related to the boxwork ridges, and the back side of a ridge we recently studied in detail, “Volcán Peña Blanca.” Together, the images will help us understand the geologic history of the area that hosts the boxwork ridges, and what conditions existed in this part of Mount Sharp to support their formation.

We did not neglect the rocks directly in front of the rover as we gazed at our surroundings. Indeed, the bedrock near the rover was nearly uniformly packed with small (less than 1 centimeter, or 0.39 inches) rounded nodules, a characteristic we have not seen for awhile. MAHLI will image three different instances of the nodules while APXS and ChemCam will each analyze two different targets to understand the chemistry of the nodules and the bedrock hosting them.

REMS, RAD, and DAN will continue to monitor the Martian environment and subsurface throughout the weekend. Additionally, we planned multiple observations of dust devils, the amount of dust in the atmosphere, and clouds including a cloud movie timed to match the overflight of the CASSIS instrument. Our drive will take us to the foot of the smooth slope seen in the distance of the above image. That slope is the ramp we will take to the top of a big boxwork structure, where surely other delightful vistas await.

Explore More

3 min read

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4595-4596: Just Another Beautiful Day on Mars

Article


22 hours ago

4 min read

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4593-4594: Three Layers and a Lot of Structure at Volcán Peña Blanca

Article


5 days ago

3 min read

Continuing the Quest for Clays

Article


1 week ago

Keep Exploring

Discover More Topics From NASA

Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…

All Mars Resources

Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,…

Rover Basics

Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a…

Mars Exploration: Science Goals

The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four…

Powered by WPeMatico

Get The Details…