Pioneer Commercial Space Station Receives $1 Million Crowdfunding Boost

Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC) has raised an additional $1 million to advance its Pioneer commercial space station facility development.

“In addition to offering habitation for tourism, we are pursuing companies in industries that can benefit from space manufacturing including semiconductors, data communications and pharmaceuticals.”

Rhonda Stevenson, chief executive office of Orbital Assembly.

The company raised the funds on the Netcapital (Reg. CF) crowdfunding site after its first successful funding round in 2021. This round is scheduled to close at the end of February.

“Exceeding $1 million gives the company the opportunity to fill key positions and focus on attracting larger investors and strategic partners,” says Rhonda Stevenson, chief executive office of Orbital Assembly. “In addition to offering habitation for tourism, we are pursuing companies in industries that can benefit from space manufacturing including semiconductors, data communications and pharmaceuticals.”

Although long term space habitation without gravity results in numerous health issues and lacks standard earthly comforts, OAC says it is the only company pursuing a space station with gravity. The structure overcomes this obstacle by producing its own simulated gravity with slow rotation.

The Pioneer Commercial Space Station architecture is modular and allows for rapid expansion. As demand for leasable space on the station grows, the hotel component will host a more diverse population of visitors, and result in a lower cost per person.

According to the Orbital Assembly website, the Pioneer class commercial space station marks a fundamental shift away from existing station architectures. Artificial gravity capabilities are now available in the LEO ecosystem.

Its flexible architecture can accommodate 2 to 8 Habitable Modules, 2 to 8 Airlocks and 4 to 16 Docking ports. Approximately 116 feet in diameter, the station offers a crew capacity of 14 to 56 (configuration dependent), simulated gravity up to what would be experienced on the Moon, isolated long duration mission simulations, separate tourist facilities and pressurized and vacuum payloads.

Earlier this year, Orbital Assembly held a successful demonstration of the Demonstrator Station Truss Assembly Robot, or DSTAR.

DSTAR is the ground based engineering model for proving the construction methodology that will be used for subsequent machines. Orbital Assembly validated DSTAR's capabilities to build hundreds of feet of truss in under an hour. The machine is capable of building a 2m x 2m truss of any length necessary.

(Source: Orbital Assembly news release. Additional information from the Orbital Assembly website. Image from Facebook)