Space Odyssey: Simulating a Mission to Space on Washington's Anacostia Riverfront

Washington, D.C. is home to NASA Headquarters, yet the city lacks a dedicated NASA visitor center. Space Odyssey confronts that gap with a proposal that does more than fill a missing program slot: it stages the entire arc of a space mission as a sequence of architectural environments. Visitors don't just look at exhibits about space travel. They walk through preparation labs, cross a symbolic portal from Earth to cosmos, and arrive inside a geodesic dome where anti-gravity simulations and digital projections replicate the sensation of being off-planet.

Designed by Vikram Ghattora and Ankur Gupta, the project received an Honorable Mention in the Moontrip 2019 competition. Sited on the Anacostia riverfront near Anacostia Park, the complex organizes itself into three integrated phases: Preparation, Journey, and Result. Each mirrors a real stage of a space mission, translating abstract scientific processes into physical, walkable spatial sequences that target children, students, and space enthusiasts.

A Courtyard That Bridges Earth and Space

The ground-level courtyard operates as the hinge between the project's earthbound and cosmic halves. Circular paving and water features draw visitors from the barrel-vaulted glass structure, which houses the Preparation phase, toward the geodesic dome that contains the simulated space environment. The materiality is deliberate: transparent glass volumes for the science and engineering labs signal openness and visibility, while the triangulated dome skin shifts perception overhead, framing projections of celestial bodies and planetary surfaces. Inside the dome, the structure itself becomes scenography, its tessellated glazing dissolving the boundary between architecture and projected cosmos.

The Preparation zone separates mechanical design workshops from theoretical science labs, acknowledging the distinct but interdependent work of engineers and scientists. Museum galleries and interactive zones depicting project development sit alongside these working spaces, so visitors witness the unseen labor that enables a mission before they ever encounter the spectacle of simulated spaceflight. A fluid architectural form unifies these separate programs, representing the flow of knowledge and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Site Strategy Along the Anacostia

The site plan reveals how multiple dome structures, parking areas, and roadway circulation are organized to maximize public access from the riverfront. Positioned near Anacostia Park and within reach of NASA's own campus, the complex takes advantage of an underutilized stretch of waterfront to create a destination that is both symbolically resonant and practically accessible. The domes are distributed across the site rather than clustered, creating intervals of landscape between architectural events. This spacing reinforces the narrative of a journey: each structure marks a phase, and the act of walking between them becomes part of the experience.

Immersive Interiors from Labs to Lunar Terrain

The composite renderings expose the range of interior conditions the designers envision. Vaulted corridors lit with ambient gradients connect to geodesic interiors fitted with tiered seating and projection surfaces. The Result phase, housed within the primary dome, integrates a digital projection studio, anti-gravity simulation modules, and virtual planetary exploration environments. Children can walk through spaces that replicate astronaut training conditions, while the dome's interior topography draws from space terrain to reinforce the feeling of being on another world. A restaurant shaped like a spacecraft and a mini-civilization prototype that imagines closed-loop living on another planet extend the program beyond education into speculative future habitation.

At dusk, the domes reflected in the Anacostia's water take on a different character entirely. The illuminated corridors glow outward, and the geodesic geometry reads less as architecture and more as a series of landed vessels. This nighttime condition is not incidental; it collapses the distance between the project's speculative premise and a visitor's visceral experience of encountering something that looks genuinely otherworldly against the D.C. skyline.

Why This Project Matters

Space Odyssey works because it refuses to treat space exploration as content to be displayed in a building. Instead, it treats the building itself as a vehicle. The three-phase narrative structure, Preparation to Journey to Result, gives visitors a spatial script that mirrors the emotional arc of a real mission: anticipation, transition, arrival. That sequencing is what separates this proposal from a conventional science museum with a dome tacked on.

Ghattora and Gupta also make a shrewd urbanistic argument. By identifying the absence of a NASA visitor center in the very city where NASA operates, they anchor a speculative project in a concrete need. The Anacostia riverfront site gives the complex visibility, public access, and a reflective surface that doubles the architecture's presence at night. For a competition entry, it demonstrates an unusual maturity: the willingness to let narrative, site, and program reinforce each other rather than relying on formal novelty alone.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Vikram Ghattora, Ankur Gupta

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Project credits: Space Odyssey" by Vikram Ghattora, Ankur Gupta Moontrip 2019 (uni.xyz).