Every room you’ve ever stood in has a floor. London transport studio Of My Imagination (OMI) just designed one that doesn’t.
Its interior for Thunderbird, the first concept station from Florida startup Max Space, throws out up and down entirely, and the result looks like a 1968 movie set that decided to become real.
Thunderbird packs small enough to ride a single SpaceX Falcon 9, then unfurls in orbit to about twenty times its folded size. Fully open, it holds 350 cubic meters (12,360 cubic feet) of pressurized space, roughly a third of the International Space Station, and nobody has to bolt modules together in orbit to get there.
The shell is soft architecture: layers of fabric including Kevlar, built to three times the required safety margins. Max Space says its testing so far meets or beats NASA standards for heat, vacuum, vibration and micrometeoroid strikes.
Every wall is a floor
With no gravity deciding which way is down, OMI laid the station out like a wheel. A central equipment core sits at the hub, and the ring around it splits into eight sectors: crew quarters, labs, exercise, mission control, with the bathrooms tucked discreetly behind bulkheads. Handholds run everywhere and a foot tether circles the perimeter, so crew can plant themselves and work on any surface they like.
On Earth the ceiling is wasted space. Up here it’s prime real estate!
OMI designer Dan Window described the job as inventing a way to work in microgravity “when there are no existing reference points.”
A wink at 2001 and Skylab
The studio named two influences on that circular plan, and they’re exactly the right two. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s Space Station V was a spinning white wheel furnished with Olivier Mourgue’s red Djinn chairs, the most stylish waiting room ever put in orbit. Skylab, America’s first space station, launched in 1973, and industrial designer Raymond Loewy consulted on its interior. He lobbied NASA for a window to look at Earth and a table where the crew could eat facing one another.
Half a century later, Thunderbird makes Loewy’s case all over again. A padded retreat wraps four windows around a 360-degree view of the planet, and the communal heart of the station is a kitchen with plants growing in it. Our favorite detail in the whole project is that garden, set right at the center, the one thing aboard that reminds you where you came from.
Privacy, sewn from fabric
Astronauts have said for years that a private corner matters on long missions. OMI’s answer is a sleeping cocoon made of textile, with room for photographs, personal tech and the small things that make a bunk feel like yours.
Fabric is easy to customize and easy to mend, which matters a lot when the nearest repair shop is 250 miles straight down. Max Space CEO Saleem Miyan framed the whole brief as fixing the old complaints about life in orbit: no privacy, cramped quarters, rooms that feel like a lab.
Light that keeps time
In low Earth orbit the sun rises roughly every 90 minutes, which is no way to sleep. Thunderbird’s soft, indirect lighting runs its own gentle day and night, keeping the crew’s body clocks steady and in sync with ground control’s working hours. The light tells you when you are, the windows tell you where.
Built to be rebuilt
The science side is just as clever. More than 60 payload lockers are sized to match NASA’s ISS Express racks, so equipment that flew on the old station slots right in. A track system carries the racks along with grab bars, cameras and laptops, cables disappear into integrated channels, and astronauts can reconfigure the tubular frame themselves as missions change. Former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, Max Space’s lead astronaut, worked with the team, and OMI brought lessons from its earlier Neptune capsule for Space Perspective.
Thunderbird is still a concept for now. But somewhere a designer is choosing fabric for a bedroom that will never have a floor, and we’d love to see the swatches!
Images courtesy of OMI and Max Space.
