Commercial Space Station Could Host Low-Gravity Sports

Author:
Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

Date
02/04/2022

 PDF

Axiom Space

Crew interior of the Axiom Station

Space Entertainment Enterprise (S.E.E.), which plans on shooting (part of) a Tom Cruise movie in low-Earth orbit, has announced an interesting addition to Axiom’s commercial space station – S.E.E. has tapped Axiom to build SEE-1, the world’s first content and entertainment studios and multi-purpose arena in space.

It gets even more fascinating when you look at the description, where it states that the U.K. media company is “developing multiple forms of entertainment, music, and sports to exploit the microgravity environment” (emphasis mine).

And it’s not the only time S.E.E. mentions sports. Nor is it mere rhetoric.

“The module will allow artists, producers, and creatives to develop, produce, record, and live stream content which maximizes the Space Station’s low-orbit micro-gravity environment, including films, television, music and sports events,” S.E.E. notes in its press release announcing SEE-1.

SEE-1 also has some bigtime Hollywood muscle attached to it – consultants and advisors including the former Senior Vice President of Sports and Pay Per View at HBO, the former CEO of Endemol Shine UK, and the former Vice President of Technology at Viacom, alongside NYC-based investment bank GH Partners.

So the question becomes, what will content creators do with such a unique venue and what’ll it look like? And just as important, how many artists, producers, and creatives will be able to foot the bill?

Back in 2017, Medium had a fascinating piece discussing the prospect of zero-G (or reduced gravity) sports, and it’s worth mentioning since we may face that possibility in the future.

Space buffs know that microgravity and low-gravity wreak cause a significant loss in bone mineral density (BMD) and for the exact same reason as bedridden patients – the body bears no weight for an extended period of time, resulting in skeletal unloading.

So astronauts are constantly working out to stave off irreparable bone loss and prevent muscle atrophy. But treadmills and exercise bikes get boring after a while, so it’s entirely possible that future astronauts (and space tourists) could choose sports over stationary exercise.

And when you combine that with the financial might of media juggernauts, you’ve got some interesting possibilities.

Medium notes that, while contact sports would likely be a hard-sell in microgravity – because of its gravity requirements and our growing understanding of head trauma – soccer could receive an interesting makeover.

Low-gravity soccer would need to factor in a third dimension, and so a redesigned field would likely resemble a rectangular prism (or 3-D oval), with spectators arrayed in a sphere of seats in all directions.

Goals, too, would be redesigned, to either be open in all directions (creating a unique challenge for goalies) or embedded in the walls.

Of course, the game, itself, couldn’t just be a bunch of players aimlessly floating around in microgravity – picture the “Battle Room” from Ender’s Game but with a low-G soccer ball instead of lasers.

So the redesigned soccer would have to incorporate some sort of magnetic system to keep players relatively tethered to a surface, making the game more of an extra-dimensional than a low-G sport.

That said, all of this probably won’t happen for decades (or even centuries), when space travel is affordable enough for two teams and a modest-sized crowd to make the trip. More than likely, the SEE-1 will be used for expensive one-offs, like the forthcoming Tom Cruise movie or a concert that’s livestreamed globally.

We’ll begin to get some sort of idea in the next couple years – the SEE-1 will launch in 2024, docking with Axiom’s commercial space station, and when the station separates from the ISS in 2028, the SEE-1 will comprise one-fifth of its volume.

RELATED

 


-->