CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Forget blowup air mattresses. Space station astronauts are getting their first inflatable room.
It’s a technology demo meant to pave the way for moon bases and Mars expeditions, as well as orbiting outposts catering to scientists and tourists in just a few more years. Bigelow Aerospace is behind the experiment, which will get a ride to the International Space Station with another private space company.
An unmanned SpaceX Falcon rocket is set to launch late Friday afternoon, carrying a capsule full of supplies with the pioneering pod in its trunk. It will be SpaceX’s first station delivery since a launch accident halted shipments last June.
Once attached to the station, the soft- sided Bigelow compartment will be inflated to the size of a small bedroom. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, BEAM for short, will stay there two years — with astronauts occasionally ducking in. It will be the first time an astronaut steps inside an expandable habitat structure in space.
“It’s not just historic for our company, which obviously is the case, but I think it’s historic for the architecture,” said Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace and owner of Budget Suites of America.
As a precursor to larger systems, Bigelow said BEAM could “change the entire dynamic for human habitation” in space. He hopes to have a pair of private space stations ready for launch by 2020.
In the meantime, companies — even countries — are clamoring to put their own experiments inside the empty BEAM, Bigelow said Thursday. If everything goes well, that next commercial step could happen in perhaps six months, he said.
The Las Vegas-based company won’t divulge the material used for BEAM’s outer layers — or even how many layers — just that the layers are spread out to absorb and break up any penetrating bits of space junk. When NASA was working on the tech- nology during the 1990s, a combination of Nextel, Kevlar, foam and other fabric formed the multilayer shield.
