Outer Space — Hospitality’s Final Frontier?

Construction costs, rising interest rates and sustainability regulations have nothing on gravity, which imposes perhaps real estate’s steadiest limitation. No designer or developer — no matter how experienced or well funded — can work around one fundamental truth: What goes up, must come down. 

That is, unless you’re designing for outer space. 

From Blue Origin’s controversial influencer-packed voyage — which received backlash for its environmental impact — to everything going on with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, spaces for outer space have entered the orbit of popular culture. The commercial real estate industry has taken note, applying and tweaking hospitality concepts to amenitize spaceships and space stations.  

Space tourism has proven its profitability, albeit with high costs for a niche market, said David Malott, CEO of Huntsville, Ala.’s AI SpaceFactory. (As home of the Marshall Space Flight Center and U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville is known as “Rocket City.”) Between 2024 and 2030, researchers anticipate that the space tourism market — which was valued around $1.3 billion in 2024 — will have a 31.6 percent compound annual growth rate, and, by 2030, be valued at $6.7 billion, according to a 2025 market report. 

As this nontraditional form of real estate blasts off, all bets for traditional design are likewise off — though the same design pillars seem to create a through line between hotels on Earth and square footage hurtling past the Kármán line. Excluding the technical aspects of space operations and engineering, it’s amenities that have emerged as the next wave of suborbital essentials, creating a new medium of hospitality. Now, space vessels increasingly must maintain the same aesthetic and comfort fundamentals as any in-demand office or hotel, yet with new challenges and parameters. 

“The first rule of space — it’s a harsh one — is space wants to kill you,” said Malott. “We romanticize space, and there are many romantic things about it, but humans are not designed for space.” 

The product of engineers rather than architects, space habitats have traditionally been designed around one primary function: to ensure safety and operations, said Malott. 

“We thought that people at NASA were actually thinking about the astronauts and they were approaching everything from a human-centric approach, and that was very much not the case,” said Larry Traxler, Hilton’s senior vice president for global architecture and design. “What they were doing was trying to keep everybody alive, and do it in the most efficient way.”

In 2022, Traxler’s Hilton announced a partnership with Voyager Space on the Starlab Space Station. When that project emerged, Traxler noticed value-add solutions, and the collaboration has since put human-centered design — the same principle that entices employees back to the office and tenants to new high-rise apartments — at the forefront.

These human-focused features largely materialize through a better delineation of rooms to accommodate living, working and playing in orbit, as well as strategic aesthetics that help combat the inherent confines of a spaceship. 

“Designing for outer space means you need to design for comfort in tight quarters, deliver elevated service in remote conditions, and personalize experiences,” Lori Horvath, hotels and hospitality practice lead for the Americas for project and development services at JLL, told Commercial Observer via email. “These are all directly transferable from current hospitality design principles that are evaluated and implemented on a daily basis.”

Granted, on quick voyages, like Blue Origin’s seven-minute mission, amenities and creature comforts don’t make much of a difference. “Short-term missions are really about the thrill of being there,” said Malott. “You want to feel that you’re taken care of, that there’s a host who’s concerned about your safety.”

On longer trips, however, psychological and physiological factors come into play — “and I think that’s where design becomes more important than ever,” said Malott.

After all, it’s not like astronauts can go outside for a breath of fresh air — at least, not without a spacesuit — or socialize with new people. Relieving confinement is therefore crucial, and something both Malott and Traxler have intentionally prioritized.

Imagine a hotel room, even a luxury suite at a five-star resort. “If you’re only in your room — ever in your room — even the most beautiful room could look like a jail, right?” said Malott, who has worked on designing multiple terrestrial hotels, as well as a Mars habitat. (The cost of something like this remains speculative, so Malott declined to comment on any numbers.) “The fact that the hotels have amenities and you kind of have freedom of movement to go from one space to another is important.”

To provide that freedom of movement within the confines of a spacecraft Traxler’s Hilton started to ask questions about zones for separate functions that would divide the space station into areas for entry and arrival, grooming, sleeping, working and socializing. 

“We realized that a lot of these questions were never asked,” said Traxler. “They sort of came together in a way that engineers thought was most efficient.”

The first International Space Station didn’t even have a dining table, he said. “Imagine that very notion of communal gathering around a dining table and how that might bond and bring astronauts together who are from the U.S. and USSR — and that wasn’t even there,” said Traxler. “They fashioned a table out of a scrap piece of material.”

Now, Hilton’s space capsule — which is 26 feet in diameter — is divided into three different levels, each of which is about 8 feet high, said Traxler. 

“Up and down don’t make the same logical sense as they do on Earth,” said Traxler. “What we’re using the different levels for is to create a more social public floor, a more thoughtfully concentrated work floor. … And then the bottom floor — which isn’t really the bottom when it’s moving sideways — is essentially dedicated to medical waste and showering and exercise. So, more noisy, less social and more private functions.”

This delineation of spaces evokes a design trend — flexibility in use — popularized during the pandemic. Commercial spaces that can easily morph in function over the course of a day take advantage of any given space. Consider cafes that transition from coffee to lunch to happy hour, or offices and coworking spaces that double as gyms. 

Outer space has less physical space to achieve this flexibility, but Traxler has leveraged aesthetics to delineate different spatial uses. Color and lighting go a long way in creating dedicated zones, orienting astronauts or space tourists to their surroundings.

“Maybe it’s the work zone, but it’s a brighter, whiter light that is more conducive to working,” said Traxler. “But, when you move into the more social zone, maybe that light morphs into a 2700 Kelvin, more like incandescent light, and it’s more sort of human-centric and less work-centric.”

Similarly, windows are a useful aesthetic tool to combat claustrophobia, though not without risks. “When you’re outside of Earth orbit and you’re outside of Earth’s magnetosphere, windows let in a lot of space radiation,” said Malott. “So you need to balance this between a human being’s desire to want to look out to the world beyond, and space radiation wanting to kill you if you’re exposed to it for too long.”

Humans can be exposed to space radiation for only a set amount of time, as outlined by the National Institutes of Health. Once that time is exceeded, “your odds of getting cancer increase beyond what’s acceptable,” said Malott. 

To circumvent these health risks without surrendering to claustrophobia, high-tech features may be a designer’s best bet. Technologically aided smart windows that log how long someone is exposed to space radiation could alert the vessel’s inhabitants about when they need to open and close their shutters, said Malott.

This window limitation underlines the constraints of designing for space vessels, which — while increasingly human-centric — adhere to a unique set of rules. Sweat, for instance, floats in space, making a space station’s delineation of uses all the more important.  

“You don’t want some of those things that are coming off of the treadmill — or the astronaut on the treadmill — anywhere near your food, and from a noise and energy perspective, it doesn’t coexist well,” said Traxler. 

Astronauts also can’t use gym equipment as they would in a hotel gym or a Crunch Fitness. Cardio equipment doesn’t work the same in zero gravity, said Traxler. So if you run on a treadmill, you’ll bounce up unless you’re tethered to the machine, and muscle-building weight machines don’t function unless they’re pneumatic. 

These rules of space create both challenges and new possibilities. Normally, real estate designers think about space from the ground to, say, 7 feet in the air as the zone in which human beings interact. 

Yet, “if you have more height than that in space, it doesn’t matter because there’s no gravity to hold you down,” said Traxler. “And so you can use ceiling planes as a whole other wall of opportunity.”

Vertical designs likewise present unique opportunities. Malott’s Mars Habitat, for instance, was designed as four rooms stacked vertically with a double-shell design for structural reasons. Being able to see the levels above or below helps relieve some claustrophobia, while building vertically rather than horizontally was structurally efficient, said Malott, who compared the design to the structure of a dome. 

Still, despite pre-existing efforts to factor human comforts into space design, Malott believes space hospitality can push the envelope even further. That cozy hotel bed doesn’t need to be a bed anymore — “you could be sleeping on the ceiling for all that matters,” said Malott, though he has yet to see any designers play to this potential. 

“You can reimagine what it means to sleep, what it means to bathe, what it means to eat — and take advantage of the fact that you’re weightless and floating around,” said Malott. 

“Everything has to be thought of in a very different way than it is on Earth,” said Traxler. “The fun part is maintaining that presence or that connectivity that people have that makes them comfortable on Earth. And then giving that to them in space is probably the next big step that we’ve got everybody thinking about now: How do we make it as seamless as possible to go to space, and not learn everything all over again?”

Anna Staropoli can reached at astaropoli@commercialobserver.com.