We briefly describe a “third generation” follow-on to the Cold Atom Lab (CAL) mission, currently operating aboard the ISS and the Bose—Einstein Condensate and Cold Atom Lab (BECCAL) mission, which is expected to launch in 2026. This mission would feature a modular design that would allow critical hardware to be optimized for specific investigations while allowing easy exchange with other hardware to enable a multi-user facility. Keywords: Quantum gas, Bose Condensate, Microgravity

In the coming years we expect to see a diverse array of quantum instruments being developed and flown in space, including quantum gas experiments, optical clocks, atom interferometry experiments, and quantum information/quantum optics experiments. The International Space Station has proven itself as an exceptional platform for such missions, providing long-term microgravity in a pressurized and temperature controlled environment, with ample power, thermal and data resources. However the station is currently planned to operate only through 2030, well before many proposed quantum sciences missions could be ready for launch, and we undertake here to explore what an ideal follow-on platform might look like. In particular, we believe that a much smaller and less expensive low Earth orbiting (LEO) facility, optimized and dedicated to quantum science, could be an exceptionally powerful platform for exploring the quantum world and harnessing quantum technology. Such a platform would allow multiple quantum instruments to share resources and explore related phenomena in concert.

Existing space-based cold atom experiments have demonstrated the utility of microgravity for improvements in observation times and for minimizing the expansion energy and rate of a freely evolving coherent matter wave. In this paper we explore the potential for space-based experiments to extend the limits of ultracold atoms utilizing not just microgravity, but also other aspects of the space environment such as exceptionally good vacuums and extremely cold temperatures. The tantalizing possibility that such experiments may one day be able to probe physics of quantum objects with masses approaching the Plank mass is discussed.