In the modern era of commercial human space exploration, an increasing demand is emerging for research in microgravity. The International Space Station has a multi-year backlog on space agency experiments and was forced to raise the prices for private payloads after high demand. With the introduction of next generation launch vehicles with low costs and high payload capacities, this demand is only expected to grow.
However, these next generation launch vehicles also enable new solutions to meet this demand. This paper presents a concept for a highly modular low-cost space station which serves as an orbital science park. By specialising in commercial research, this concept delivers improvements in cost, turnaround and operational efficiency over current generation space stations. It also leverages the unique capability of the Starship launch vehicle to deliver more at lower cost.
The core work of this space station architecture was first presented as the Orbital Can System at IAC 2021 in Dubai. The Orbital Can science park draws on that concept and similar work within Nexus Aurora, as well as further research and design in different specific fields.