Amid a year of momentous developments in commercial spaceflight, including the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission and the first feature film to be shot in space, a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space has announced a commercial space station project known as Orbital Reef. The project is billed as a “mixed-use business park” that would use a 500-kilometer altitude orbit inclined 51.6 degrees to the equator.
The orbital altitude would be higher than that of the International Space Station, and the inclination would be the same as the ISS, allowing the project to use a Blue Origin-built space tug to collect usable ISS resources for Orbital Reef. This inclination would take Orbital Reef over most of the world, including launch sites in the United States, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, India, and South America.