astronaut’s amulet: a pocket-sized capsule for keepsakes and memories in zero gravity

Astronaut’s Amulet: a mini capsule for Keepsakes Beyond Earth

The Astronaut’s Amulet is a pocket-sized capsule for keepsakes that travel beyond Earth, created by designer Aleksa Milojevic. The project examines how memory, ritual, and personal experience can endure in the context of space exploration, positioning intimate, human-centered design within an emerging space-technology discourse. The amulet is a slender, compact object, small enough to be held between the fingertips. Its unique unlocking mechanism is intentionally calibrated to work intuitively only in microgravity.

By opening, it becomes a deliberate puzzle on Earth but a natural gesture in space: its two-step interlocking system disengages only when the object is fully released. Any attempt to hold or brace it keeps it locked. In microgravity, the user must spin the amulet, release it to float freely, and retrieve it once it snaps open. Only through this uninterrupted, choreographed motion does the object reveal the keepsakes it protects, turning the act of access into a spatial ritual. When centrifugal force releases the interlocking parts, the amulet opens to reveal two concealed chambers. These compartments can hold small mementos such as notes, locks of hair, or other symbolic relics carried off-world. Once unlocked, the outer shells, fitted with glass magnifying lenses, align with the inner core of the amulet. As they shift into place, engraved images on the inner surface come into focus, allowing the viewer to see them enlarged and in detail. Referencing the language of a traditional locket, these sentimental keepsake features are reimagined for life in zero gravity, transforming a familiar typology into a new object category for space.

Aleksa Milojevic’s Human-Centered Emotional Design for Space

The Astronaut’s Amulet is rooted in narratives of migration, exploration, refuge, and colonization, stories of people moving across frontiers and carrying memories, material traces, and beliefs into new territories. Designer Aleksa Milojevic’s research draws on centuries of human movement, from soil preserved in vials to heirlooms smuggled through exile, revealing how tangible matter anchors identity and belonging. By situating this impulse within the context of space, the project reintroduces intimacy and emotion into an environment often imagined as cold, remote, and purely technical. The amulet becomes both a functional device and a vessel of meaning, deliberately bridging mechanical innovation with human sentiment.

The Astronaut’s Amulet ultimately embodies the convergence of culture and engineering in the age of space exploration. The project advances the idea that space design must account not only for mechanics and performance, but also for meaning: the human need to sustain emotional continuity, personal rituals, memories, and a sense of being grounded, even when far away from home. From these studies, the amulet emerged as a synthesis of cultural continuity and technical necessity, embedding symbolic resonance within mechanical function. Today, The Astronaut’s Amulet exists as a working prototype with an international patent pending, published through WIPO. The work has been supported by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, Yale Wright Laboratory, and Yale Ventures, enabling the project to evolve from speculative proposal to engineered object. Milojevic now leads a small team actively advancing The Astronaut’s Amulet toward a finalized, deployable product, while continuing to develop a series of uniquely designed objects for use in zero gravity.

project info:

name: Astronaut’s Amulet
designer: Aleksa Milojevic

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.