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American billionaire attempts to create life for humans in space

Published

8 years ago

April 10, 2016

American billionaire attempts to create life for humans on space

An American billionaire is attempting to create life for humans on space. Robert Bigelow—low-key billionaire, space entrepreneur, avowed believer in extraterrestrials—has invited us into this warehouse to show off his blow-up space home. There are doughnuts and coffee. Soon, lunch will be served. But right now Bigelow is ambling up to a podium, where he begins to scold us.

“You laughed at me,” he says to the crowd in his North Las Vegas headquarters. “When we said we would build an expandable system and place it on the International Space Station in two and a half years, you laughed,” he says. “It’s been two years and a quarter.” He pauses, letting it sink in—that he’s ahead of schedule—then lets loose a smile, wide as the West. “And here we are.”Bigelow said infront of an audience including‎ NASA officials, JAXA officials (that’s Japan’s space agency) and the media at a briefing in Las Vegas.

Also present at the briefing were Bigelow’s employess, dressed in thin white jumpsuits, they stood inside a roped-off area surrounding a pedestal, on top of which sat a refrigerator-size object, swaddled in a gray Kevlar-like material and shaped like an upside-down mixing bowl. This was the BEAM—the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module—the future of space habitats.

According to Bigelow’s jumpsuited workers, none of whom spoke louder than a reverent whisper, the BEAM would soon travel to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida where eventually—within months or perhaps a year—it would find a berth on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket bound for the International Space Station.

At the ISS, a robotic arm would reach into the arriving SpaceX Dragon capsule, grab the BEAM, and attach it to the station’s Tranquility node. Astronauts would then send a command releasing compressed air into the BEAM.

As the BEAM becomes pressurized, it expands until the module grows to 10.5 feet wide and 565 feet cubed. Not large but not small either.

Imagine an eight-person tent or a studio apartment in Manhattan. All told, the expansion will take four and a half minutes. Then, the real work begins.

For two years, the astronauts aboard the ISS will try to determine if the BEAM, or some larger version of it, could be habitable over the long term.

They will determine leak rate, measure radiation, and examine the thermal control inside the empty module. They’ll see how the module’s soft walls stand up to the bumps and bruises in space.

And they’ll do their best to figure out just what an expandable structure orbiting Earth at about 5 miles per second feels like— an impossible thing to know until it is up there.

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