Bigelow Aerospace Shows Off Bigger, Badder Space Real Estate

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The history of Las Cruces, N.M., as a Western frontier settlement is nicely preserved at the city's Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum. On display are 19th-century pioneers' personal effects, folk art, farming tools and, not least of all, wagons and carriages once drawn by horses.

For the past six years, the museum has also served as the site of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS), an event that concerns an entirely different type of transportation—and a frontier hundreds of miles above the museum.

This year's symposium was the biggest yet, attended by 400 industry professionals and lay people, evidence of the growing interest in the nascent civilian spaceflight and tourism business.

Bigelow Aerospace, owned by Robert Bigelow, the billionaire founder of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain—and would-be space real-estate mogul—offered perhaps the biggest news of the event. For the first time, the company had a big marketing booth, displaying models of its space modules—the Sundancer and BA-330—as well as information on ambitious and larger modules intended for use beyond Earth's orbit.

Bigelow has been frustrated in the past by NASA's indecision over where the next crew vehicle would come from—private space or NASA itself. This was resolved, at least temporarily, with the passage of the authorization bill last month, and Bigelow and others now believe the civilian space industry is poised for a breakthrough.

In Las Cruces, representatives from companies including Boeing, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada/SpaceDev were all discussing their crew-transport systems , giving Bigelow confidence that at least one—and perhaps more—will realize the community's lofty goals.

For its part, Bigelow, in addition to showing off his modules, revealed for the first time the six "sovereign clients" that have signed memoranda of understanding to utilize his orbital facilities: the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Sweden.

You have to hand it to the Swedes. They considerably loosened up the proceedings with an evening reception hosted by the team from Spaceport Sweden in Kiruna. The menu consisted of herring, whole salmon, shrimp, cheese fondue and flavored Absolut vodka on a bar built of ice.

But the Swedish contingent was much more than entertaining window-dressing. In fact, its participation in the symposium directly addressed an industry-wide concern, namely, that the civilian market won't be sufficiently large to launch and support the business of space travel and tourism.

Bigelow certainly is bullish on the possibilities. He had both models and rendered posters of facilities that utilized various configurations of clusters of his workhorse BA-330 module. It's an impressive structure—45 feet long, 22 feet in diameter and containing 12,000 cubic feet of volume. (In one scheme shown by Bigelow, nine BA-330s were connected to create a space hospital with more than 100,000 cubit feet of habitable space.)

Capable of comfortably supporting six crew members, according to Bigelow, each BA-330 module is more than 10 times as large as the dual-Orion configuration that Lockheed Martin has devised for its Plymouth Rock asteroid mission. In fact, during one panel discussion, Bigelow tweaked the Lockheed Martin representative sitting next to him, claiming that "Orion is unnecessary."

Bigelow joked that he wanted to make sure that crews returned from deep space alive and well—or, at least, without turning on one another after suffering attacks of claustrophobia.

But as large as the BA-330 is, it's dwarfed by the BA-2100, which is six times as large and has multiple decks. The BA-2100's docking ends are about 25 feet in diameter, and one source told PM that the module's dry mass could be as low as 70 tons. In other words, in its uninflated state, it could be placed into orbit by the heavy-lift launcher that the U.S. Senate recently approved for development. The massive structure could then be inflated and subsequently outfitted with materials carried aboard additional launches. With its radiation and micrometeoroid shielding, the BA-2100 could provide a trip for a large crew to the outer solar system.

For now, Bigelow's Sundancer and BA-330 are essentially ready to launch at any time, with life-support testing reportedly under way. While Bigelow still considers his company to be in R&D mode, he has been expanding his manufacturing facilities in North Las Vegas to ramp up production as demand increases.

That demand depends on the successful operation of a craft to deliver customers to Bigelow's capsules. With SpaceX's recent announcement of a Nov. 18 test launch of its Dragon capsule, Bigelow may not be waiting very long. And once that new phase of space exploration and development is kicked off, we may start to develop the Conestogas we need for this new and exciting high frontier.