Inflatable ISS addition planned to launch in April

[SolarpunkFan]

http://www.popsci.com/meet-beam-inflata ... ss-default

The first astronauts on Mars probably won't live in a tin can like the International Space Station. Big, heavy structures are expensive to launch, and aren't great at protecting against the radiation they'd be pummeled with on Mars. Instead, the first Martians might live in something like a pop-up tent.

Bigelow Aerospace designs inflatable space habitats--lightweight modules that ride compacted in the trunk of a spacecraft, then expand to a much larger size in space. In a launch scheduled for April 8, the company is sending one of its modules up to the International Space Station for testing.

The module had previously been scheduled to launch in the fall of 2015, but after SpaceX suffered a rocket explosion in June, its missions to the ISS have been grounded.

Here's hoping all goes well.

[TimothyC]

This will be the third Bigelow module deployed in space. The first two (Genesis I and Genesis II) were free-flying. BEAM isn't going to be used for much other than storage, but it will be NASA's first test (BEAM is slightly shorter, and slightly wider than Genesis II, and masses about the same).

If successful, the Bigelow modules represent one of two components needed for fully commercial space flight. The other is Commercial Launch, which at this point would be either Dragon2/Falcon9 or Starliner/AtlasV.

[Knife]

The design for BEAM is pretty niffty. Also saw some design work for an inflatable ring to play with artificial gravity. Pie in the sky stuff sure, but niffty. Think it was part of the ... was it nautilus X? Yeah.

[Sea Skimmer]

Inflating stuff will get even more appealing whenever we start building space stations large enough to have dedicated storage areas, which could be pressurized to much less then sealevel as the ISS is, with dedicated airlocks. Then they could be even lighter weight structures, and you save on the air mass too. This is also appealing for manufacturing operations which would like at least some air to circulate for heat exchange and dust control purposes but may have no specific need for 14.7psi. Indeed such things are a long way off, but the sooner we do enabling work the better. Mankind of not ready to make big leaps into deep space at anything like a sane cost or reasonable risk (well, depending on what you think on that, 10% chance of death vs 50% say) but we sure can do risk reduction.