On a space station, air does not move on its own. In microgravity, warm air does not rise, and the carbon dioxide crew members exhale can linger around them unless the ventilation system keeps it moving. Starlab's Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) has to circulate fresh air through every part of the station and keep the crew comfortable. Because Starlab is designed to launch in a single flight, that design has to be right before it leaves the ground.

Flexcompute used Flow360, its GPU-native computational fluid dynamics (CFD) platform, and GeometryAI, its automated geometry preparation engine, to model airflow across the full station interior. The first study closely matched Starlab's existing models in a fraction of the time traditional CFD tools take. The teams are now extending the work to model how the carbon dioxide crew members exhale moves through the cabin and how the life support system removes it.