Spaceflight’s New Users: Defining a new class of spaceflight participant, and what it means for design.

The challenge

For sixty years, spacecraft were designed for career astronauts. Since 2021, about three in four people who have gone to space haven’t been. They include scientists, advocates, entrepreneurs and people paying to fly for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, yet are usually lumped together as “tourists.” Hardware is often still built around legacy processes and requirements, and without a shared understanding of who these new users are, the field can’t design for them.

My role

At Teague, we created New Era Astronauts, a speculative look at who might fly next, to start conversations with partners and prospective clients. I defined its participant types, from future explorers to the off-world workforce, and wrote and art-directed the report. To go deeper, I joined AIAA’s Space Architecture Technical Committee and led the Visitor chapter of its first decadal survey, establishing them as a new class of spaceflight participant: people who join a mission as temporary occupants rather than professional or long-duration crew.

There was little Visitor research to build upon, so I led three contributors through interviews with Visitors, professional crew and accessibility advocates, alongside a survey of today’s vehicles, stations and training facilities. We looked to Antarctica and Everest to see what patterns emerged as extreme environments opened up to private expeditions. To move the conversation past “tourists,” I developed archetypes that illustrate the wider spectrum of who Visitors are and why they go, and looked ahead to what the field should anticipate, from artificial gravity to intimacy in space. Where a recommendation echoed established design practice, I spelled out the Visitor-specific why and how, since spaceflight has rarely had to apply these principles so broadly.

Thinking

Visitors can’t be expected to build expert knowledge and a high tolerance for discomfort, so the spacecraft has to carry that burden: making it easy to use with little instruction, treating comfort as a requirement rather than a luxury, fostering camaraderie among people with vastly different expectations, and making audiences on Earth part of the mission experience. Visitors are no longer a niche user group, and designing for them improves spaceflight for everyone who flies.

Impact

The chapter turns that argument into a plan the field can act on: the first shared definition of the Visitor, five archetypes, design priorities and 30 specific recommendations. It makes an evidence-based case for human-centered design in an industry where engineering has always led, and is currently in steering-committee review ahead of publication as an AIAA book.

Reflection

Human spaceflight is at an inflection point: the ISS is nearing retirement and the first commercial stations are nearing launch. Decisions made in the next few years will shape who can fly for decades, and who gets left out if their needs are considered too late or not at all. I saw a narrow window to put a stake in the ground: name this population, make the case for their needs, and give the teams designing what comes next a foundation to build on.