NASA will attach the first inflatable habitat to the International Space Station (ISS) this Saturday.
The habitat was built by Bigelow Aerospace and will be carried to the station by a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and attached to the ISS using the station’s robotic Canadarm2. Astronauts will first enter the habitat about a week after expansion and, during the two-year test mission, will return to the module for a few hours several times a year to retrieve sensor data and assess conditions.
By the end of May, the habitat will be expanded to nearly five times its compressed size of seven feet in diameter by eight feet in length to roughly 10 feet in diameter and 13 feet in length, according to a NASA press statement.
Expandable habitats of this type are a huge deal for space travel because they take up less room on a rocket, but provide greater volume for living and working in space once expanded. The habitat will be closely monitored during its time at the station to see how effectively inflatable habitats protect against solar radiation, space debris and the temperature extremes of space.
“The fact that a space station in a single payload could be reality in a few years pending successful inflation is a game-changer for long-duration human space flight. Many nation s may not be able to support production of something like the ISS could likely afford some variation of Bigelow’s inflatable habs,” an engineer familiar with the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “To put not too fine a point on it, this is huge.”
NASA gave a contract worth $17.8 million to Bigelow Aerospace to produce the inflatable habitat. The company has plans to produce habitats that are three times the size of any individual ISS module.
Inflatable habitats could potentially allow large rockets to easily deliver an entire space station in one launch, which would greatly simplify the process of living and working in space.
Developing inflatable deep-space habitats is an important step towards going to Mars, according to NASA officials.
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