UCF has been tied to the space industry since before it was even called UCF. The university was built, in part, to support Kennedy Space Center. Established as Florida Technological University in 1964, its primary mission was to provide personnel and engineering talent to the space operations on Florida’s Space Coast. But the industry is changing. Space is moving from propulsion and exploration into habitation and settlement, and someone has to figure out the hospitality side of it.
That someone, at least at UCF, is Dr. Amy Gregory (Website), the Endowed Chair of Space Tourism Programming and Initiatives at Rosen College of Hospitality Management (Website), and she represents the college on the UCF Space Council, a body that recently expanded beyond engineers and physicists to include faculty from across the university in a variety of disciplines. She also lives on the Space Coast.
I had a chance to chat with her about what UCF is actually doing to prepare hospitality students for the space economy, what companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are asking for, and why the most pressing problems have nothing to do with rockets.
The easy assumption about a space tourism curriculum is that it’s preparing students for jobs that are decades away. Gregory pushes back on that immediately. “This isn’t about future scenarios,” she said. “It’s a question of user experience, applied to places it just hasn’t been applied to yet.”
There’s a science behind service, she explained, that she refers to in her classes as serviceology. Dr. Gregory says hospitality professionals know what works, what generates revenue, and what calms people, saying that the hospitality industry has already built a full ecosystem around the guest journey, looking at before arrival, during the stay, and what the Ritz-Carlton calls the “warm welcome to fond farewell.” But none of that infrastructure exists in space yet, and it’s basically the next frontier of space travel. Making it more hospitable.
“Virgin Galactic can build a spaceship,” she said, “but they don’t necessarily think about all the components of somebody being in that ship for 32 hours. It’s one thing to ask a scientist to use a toilet with a bag. It’s another to ask a billionaire.”
Space isn’t an elective at Rosen, but is woven into required coursework. All hospitality management students take a core food prep course that includes two modules on space food, looking into things like why you can’t serve anything crumbly, what grows sustainably in microgravity, and what NASA’s research tells us about long-duration nutrition. A lodging management course includes a full space module covering companies like Vast (Website), the physics of different habitat types, and what guests’ basic needs would look like in orbital, lunar, or microgravity environments.
Past assignments have asked students to design a typology of the space traveler — essentially a Maslow’s hierarchy for off-Earth guests. What are their motivations? What are their expectations? What does comfort mean when none of the defaults apply?
“We had a group use AI to design a space hotel, and they drew a pool,” Gregory said. “You’re not going to have a pool — everything floats. So they had to start completely over.” The process, she said, is the point. Students apply traditional hospitality assumptions to space, discover they don’t fit, and then figure out what does.
The most active area of research right now is food, and it goes considerably deeper than the metallic pouches of freeze-dried astronaut ice cream that everyone pictures.
NASA has demonstrated it can grow plants in microgravity — flowers, greens — and is now working on fruit. Gregory, who collaborates with Chef Caesar Rivera (Website) on the culinary science side of this work, has questioned some of those choices. Blueberries, one of the species been looked at, for example, are seasonal, require acidic soil, and are prone to mold, which can be a serious problem in a contained environment.
Rosen students recently completed a Student Space Experiment Program with multiple food-based projects, which will be presented at Kennedy Space Center at the end of the month. One experiment on kidney stone formation in microgravity is headed to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket in December. Others have examined tofu as a protein-rich, malleable base ingredient; coagulation and gelation in space, textures that provide emotional comfort in stressful environments, and fermentation. The team also explored a 30-day mission menu built from just 12 ingredients as a practical design constraint.
“We know that when you eat something smooth and creamy, it just makes us feel good,” Gregory said. “We want to understand what happens to that process in space. We believe it’s different. We just don’t know how different yet.”
But when pressed if food was one of the biggest challenges, Gregory shared that the most overlooked hospitality problem in space wasn’t dinner. It was personal hygiene and bodily waste. “It’s a very real thing in space,” she said. The ISS already runs closed-loop water reclamation that processes urine into potable water. Preparing guests psychologically for that reality, setting expectations in advance, and delivering the experience with warmth and dignity is a genuine hospitality design problem, and one that almost nobody in the industry is working on yet.
But it sounds like they have some time to figure it out. The ISS is coming down in 2030, but space commerce will come first: companies sending employees to work in orbit or on the Moon, the way corporations once posted staff abroad for years at a time. Tourism at scale depends on transport costs coming down enough for more than a small number of people to access it.
“The first jobs our graduates will hold are on Earth,” she said. “Sending people up, welcoming them back. And then, once more affordable transport is solved, it’ll go very quickly.” But the groundwork, she is convinced, has to be laid now. “People always know when hospitality is missing,” she said. “They don’t always appreciate it when it’s there.”
