Bigelow’s promise:
More space
at less cost
with inflatable
space habitats
By Lloyd Campbell
We’ve all seen or played in one of those inflatable
bounce houses at a carnival or a friend’s birthday
party. Now just imagine a bounce house that you can
live inside of in outer space.
While much more advanced than a bounce house,
that’s what Bigelow Aerospace is pursuing. They are
designing and building inflatable habitats that can
be used in outer space, providing work and living
areas while protecting the occupants from the harsh
environment of space.
When you look at the International Space Station
modules, they are hard shelled, looking very sturdy
and strong, so the idea of something that inflates to
become a module that humans can inhabit seems
very farfetched, but not to Bigelow Aerospace founder
Robert Bigelow.
The idea of inflatable spacecraft is not exactly new.
In 1958, the newly formed National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, NASA, first started a project to
design and build such a spacecraft.
The Echo-1 satellite was launched on August 12, 1960
aboard a Thor-Delta Launch vehicle inside a launch
canister that was only 3 feet in diameter. The satellite’s
skin was comprised of 31,416 square feet of Mylar, which
was only 0.0127 mm thick. To put that into perspective,
a human hair is approximately 0.06 to 0.10 mm thick.
The Mylar was covered with a thin aluminum coating
that allowed signals to bounce off the satellite when
sent to it. When inflated on orbit, it had a diameter of
over 100 feet, higher than a 10 story building.
It deployed at 1,000 miles high and was easily seen
with the naked eye here on Earth. It lasted 8 years in
orbit before finally reentering the atmosphere and
burning up.
While Echo-1 was a long way from being a spacecraft
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