One clever room. The bed folds into the ceiling — genuinely up, toward the hub — and the whole floor is your porthole to the planet. For the single crew member who considers "stuff" a launch-mass liability.
01 / STATION SCHEMATIC · REV. D
LEO · 420 KM · 51.6° INCL · ⌀ 360 M RING · ω 2.20 RPM
A neighborhood
in low Earth
orbit.
Orbital Commons is a housing co-op four hundred and twenty kilometres up. Sixteen sunrises a day, a greenhouse that actually smells like dirt, spin-gravity you feel in your knees, and neighbours who'll water your tomatoes while you're groundside.
Membership is a mortgage, a launch seat, and a promise to take out the recycling.
- Altitude
- 420 km
- Ring radius
- 180 m
- Rim gravity
- 0.97 g
- Households
- 144 berths
02 / LIFE ABOARD · ONE ORBIT = 92 MIN
A day is ninety-two minutes long.
You get sixteen of them.
Your body still runs on Earth time — twenty-four hours, three meals, one bedtime — so the station lies to you. The lights warm at 06:30 ship-time and cool at 22:00, no matter how many actual sunrises slide past the porthole. Here is a Tuesday.
- 06:30orbit 04
Wake, then the window
Ship-dawn. You will watch a real sunrise over the Pacific while brushing your teeth. It lasts about eight seconds. You will still be impressed on day 900.
- 07:10orbit 04
Greenhouse shift
Everyone owes the ring four hours a week. You pollinate strawberries with an electric toothbrush and pretend you're a bee. It works. It's oddly meditative.
- 12:00orbit 07
Lunch in the commons
Long table, real chairs, spin-gravity holding your soup in the bowl. Someone's third sunrise of the meal flares across the far wall. Nobody looks up. That's how you know you live here.
- 17:30orbit 11
Gym ring, or the run
The outer ring pulls a full g. You run laps against the spin so the horizon rises to meet you forever. It never arrives. Very good for the calves; strange for the soul.
- 22:00orbit 15
Ship-dusk, lights down
Blackout blinds, because eight more sunrises are coming before your alarm and your circadian rhythm has filed a formal complaint. Goodnight. Mind the Coriolis when you roll over.
03 / THE HOMES · TECHNICAL DRAWINGS · SCALE 1:50
Three ways to live
on a spinning wheel.
Every home sits on the outer habitat ring, floor pointing out, ceiling pointing in toward the hub. "Down" is just the direction the wheel throws you. Berths are sold at cost; you buy the volume, the co-op keeps the air.
A proper kitchen with a stove that respects gravity, a bedroom with a door that closes, and a three-window bay for watching weather systems from above. Our most popular berth. There is a waitlist within the waitlist.
Two bedrooms, a hearth big enough for a birthday, and your own square metre of soil where you're contractually allowed to grow one non-productive plant purely because it's pretty. Kids raised here have excellent balance and no fear of heights.
04 / COMMUNITY CHARTER · RATIFIED IN SPIN
We are not a spaceship.
We are a street that happens to be turning.
- I.
The air is a commons. You do not own your oxygen; you tend it. Everyone owes the greenhouse four hours a week, and yes, that includes the founders.
- II.
Gravity is a shared invention. The ring spins for all of us. No household may slow it, speed it, or install a private centrifuge. We tried. It went badly.
- III.
Quiet hours follow ship-time, not orbit-time. If the fourteenth sunrise of your night keeps you up, that is between you and the blackout blinds.
- IV.
Water your neighbour's tomatoes. Someday you'll be groundside and someone will water yours. This is the entire economic model, restated.
- V.
Take out the recycling. Everything up here is precious, finite, and heavier than it looks. There is no "away" to throw it to.
— Signed by 144 households, in low Earth orbit, at a relative velocity of 7.66 km/s.
05 / THE SCIENCE · SPIN-GRAVITY · a = ω²r
There is no gravity here.
We make our own.
Spin a bucket of water on a rope and it stays in the bucket. That's the whole trick. The station is the bucket, you're the water, and the floor is the far end of a very large rope called the ring. Spin the wheel and everything inside is flung outward — a force your inner ear happily files under "down".
How strong that pull feels depends on two numbers: how fast the ring turns (ω, in radians per second) and how far you stand from the centre (r, in metres). The physics is honest and one line long:
a = ω2 · r
Stand at the rim (r = 180 m) and you feel almost a full Earth g. Ride the lift toward the hub and gravity fades to nothing — which is exactly why the greenhouse, the gym, and your grandmother's flat all live at different radii. Drag the dial and watch the ring decide how heavy you are.
SPIN-GRAVITY CALCULATORLIVE
radius r180 m
apparent gravity0.97 g
acceleration9.6 m/s²
rim speed41 m/s
a = (0.2304)² × 180 = 9.56 m/s² ≈ 0.97 g
06 / WAITLIST · PRE-FLIGHT CHECKLIST · FORM OC-1
Apply to move in.
It reads like a pre-flight check
because, well.
We take about a dozen new households a year. There's a launch physical, a fortnight of spin-adaptation, and a frank conversation about whether you'll really water the tomatoes. Start here.
This is a demonstration form. Nothing is transmitted, launched, or sold.