Commercial Space Stations: Bigelow Aerospace & Axiom Space

Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/neoscribe Awesome Merchandise: https://sfsf.shop/support-neoscribe/ Orion Span Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0CBLw0xOlo&t=6s NASA plans to share the cost of the development of at least one commercial space station in the near future. This is because the current administration wants to end support of the ISS and facilitate the transition to the commercialization of LEO by 2025. Per the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, the vision of this transition is to create a low-Earth orbit non-governmental human space flight enterprise where NASA is just one of MANY customers. There are at least 3 companies who are developing commercial space stations, there’s Bigelow Aerospace, Axiom Space, and Orion Span, which I imagine will all compete for NASA funding at some point. Robert Bigelow started out developing the commercial real estate in the late 1960’s including apartments and hotels and founded Budget Suites of America in 1987. In 1999, he founded Bigelow Aerospace which specializes in expandable space modules. NASA engineers first came up with the idea for expandable structures for use in space back in the 1960’s. Then in the 1990’s, NASA worked on the TransHab project, which was meant to be an expandable habitat module for the ISS. The Transhab featured a 30 cm shell consisting an around 2 dozen layers made out of various materials including Kevlar. Congress canceled the project in 2000 and NASA licensed the patents to the technology to Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow expanded on the technology and launched the experimental habitats Genesis I and II in 2006 and 2007. When the modules reach orbit, nitrogen and oxygen tanks release a breathable mix of air and inflates the module to 40% and then the air expands the module the rest of the way. So now Bigelow is developing the B330 inflatable space habitat in North Las Vegas Nevada. The B330 is a multi-purpose module that will be used for industrial and scientific purposes as well as for space tourism. The design of the B330 is based on the NASA’s TransHab design, the 330 comes from its pressurized volume of 330 cubic meters close to the TransHab design which was supposed to have almost 340 cubic meters. the station called Alpha Station. The Alpha Station will be available to use to international space agencies who want to do research and conduct spaceflight training, to corporations for various industrial purposes and for space tourism. And the station will be marketed and operated by the new company called Bigelow Space Operations, founded in February of this year. Based on estimates in 2013, the price for leasing 2 months of 110 cubic meters of the station will be $25 million dollars, not including launch costs which will be around $26 to $36 million depending on the launch vehicle. Another interesting thing is that similar to sports stadiums, the naming rights will be up for sale at a cost of $25 per year for full naming right and $12.5 million per year for the naming rights of one of the B330 modules. Enter the B2100 AKA the Olympus. The Olympus will have a pressurized volume of 2,250 cubic meters, almost 2 and a half times the volumes of the ISS! Check out these pictures taken by Erik Verduzco from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Look how massive it is, imagine that in space! Axiom Space was founded in 2015 and their vision is to make living and working in space commonplace as a means to a robust economy in low Earth orbit. The strength behind Axiom Space is the people in the organization, starting with its founder and CEO Michael Suffredini. Suffredini has over 30 years of experience in human spaceflight and served as NASA’s ISS Program manager for a decade prior to his retirement. Axiom’s Chairman Kam Ghaffarian founded Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies or SGT in 1994, SGT being NASA’s second largest engineering service provider. Stephen Altemus of Axiom’s Engineering department is a former Deputy Director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) which oversees human spaceflight plans and programs for NASA. And this experience goes on throughout the entire company and their team as a whole has been involved in every ISS mission since the beginning of the program. Axiom plans to attach a module to the ISS in 2019 and start sending customers to it by 2020. And then they hope to have their Space Station ready by 2022. Although Axiom will not be using exciting expandable module technology, their space station will be amazing in other ways.