Basic Trope: People who live their whole lives in space.
- Straight: It's common for people to spend all or most of their lives in space, sometimes resulting in entire families being born away from planets and subcultures to develop around this lifestyle.
- Exaggerated: The Voidborn are a large culture of people who spend their whole lives aboard their ships, and consider setting foot on a planet to be unseemly — and the more well-developed space stations are on thin ice, too.
- Downplayed: Space traders often spend large parts of their lives aboard their ships, but have to return to planets for recreation and to make use of medical facilities, which can't be replicated well aboard cramped spaceships.
- Justified:
- Interstellar travel is an extremely slow process, requiring vessels to be crewed by multiple consecutive generations. When they get where they're going, some crews are too acclimated to their home to be eager to adapt to a strange new environment.
- Space travel is so casual and advanced that it's very easy to fit a spaceship with everything people need to live, so that people who travel a lot often have little practical need to leave their vessels.
- Inverted: The Earthchildren are a culture who refuses to leave planetary life, citing a variety of health and spiritual concerns for why space travel is dangerous and ill-advised.
- Subverted: A spaceship crew refuses to go past orbital docks on most of their ports of call, but casually heads down to the surface of another planet — it turns out they just disliked the previous ones in particular.
- Double Subverted: They then return from planetside with their original goal in hand — a nanotech waste disposal and matter replicator that will allow them to turn their spaceship into a fully self-contained environment, so that they'll be able to stay spaceborne indefinitely.
- Deconstructed: Some spacers try to cut themselves off from planetary society, but spaceships are cramped and uncomfortable and it's extremely difficult to fit all the processes needed for long-term livability in one, so these attempts never take off.
- Reconstructed: ... until multiple technological revolutions allow for the creation of larger spaceships and much more efficient life support, allowing this lifestyle to become viable.
