Nyx 7

5 min readFeb 20, 2023

A competition submission for the Design for Space Travel competition. It explores the possibilities of commuting between earth and moon.

About the competition

The Design for Space Travel challenge is a competition funded by Autodesk and the Airbus foundation. With 3 months time and set technical requirements, the task was to design a spaceship to commute from earth to moon.

I had to create a full-scale model in the CAD software Fusion 360 and at least one render of that model. Additionally, I made a short video featuring explanations of form and function.

Philosophy

Nyx 7 is a spaceship designed for Earth-to-Moon commuting. It is supposed to make commuting comfortable and empowering at the same time - being designed around the traveler and their needs which creates an optimized user experience. To me, traveler really symbolizes the journey, which is what Nyx is all about. Empowering you on your journey and making sure you’re taken care of. That way, you can fully experience the journey in a comfortable way.

The exterior philosophy is fairly simple. Nyx doesn’t scream for attention, unlike most things in our lives. But when you do gift it with your attention, you should be rewarded with a sense of joy.
To accomplish this, I focused on making the body very simple, yet defined. The priority was to really get the proportions right, and have clear lines, rather than the conventional convoluted design seen in most sci-fi spaceships. At the same time, I wanted to ensure Nyx has character. The headlights played a significant role in this. The human brain automatically recognizes them as eyes, which play an important role in emotional perception. Together with the high contrast coloration, it has the looks of an orca - a very beautiful, but also an aggressive and fierce animal. But at the same time, I wanted to ensure that Nyx is also elegant. So I created wings that are designed to perform peaceful and swan-like motions.

The interior is supposed to provide the “right” environment. It is all about the user experience. The main inspiration for that were coffee shops. They create a productive but also welcoming and familiar space. That’s what Nyx’s interior is aimed at to enable a fitted user experience.

Design process

The design process for this project wasn’t much unlike any other project. I started off with a brainstorming sketch to visualize the thoughts, that I had for this product.

I then refined this sketch to create a more thought out version of it which I then made a model out off in Fusion 360. With a quick mock-up of this design, it was fairly easy to sort out the weak parts of this design and to improve the promising features. This lead to a very different looking concept which had a lot of inspiration from the previous design. I then created a second sketch to figure out specific proportions and a different view.
Lastly, I created a full-scale 3d model, using Fusion 360 which involved a lot of modification and tweaks to finally get the right design. I even printed some parts to see the proportions in real life (I also did it because it looks cool).

Features

Nyx 7 is a multilevel (3 levels, to be precise) design that features a storage room, zero gravity washrooms and a children’s playroom in the basement.
The main floor contains a big coffee bar and a glass ceiling to provide a stunning view, even for the passengers in the lower level. This level also hosts the “cockpit” with premium technology and high-resolution displays. There also is extra space for the crew to prepare on-flight meals and another area, where the crew has their seats and even two sleeping cabins.
The top level has a display showing the flight-progress. Passengers on that level can enjoy a 180° panorama view.
56 Passengers and 11 crew members experience premium seating that is fitted for a comfortable journey. Throughout the spaceship, colorful LED lights are placed for a comforting atmosphere.
The wings feature multiple settings and solar panels are installed on the outer side to power all onboard technology.