In this image taken from NASA video on Saturday, May 28, 2016, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is in the process of being inflated.
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On Thursday, astronauts on board the International Space Station were scheduled to spend about 45 minutes inflating the BEAM (Bigelow Expandable Activity Module), a room made out of fabric created to be blown up like a balloon with air from inside the ISS.
Today’s successful deployment follows Thursday’s first attempt, in which the tightly packed fabric of the BEAM refused to expand as predicted when air was fed into it in one to five second bursts over a six hour period. Eight tanks of air inside the module then opened to fully inflate BEAM to the size of a small bedroom, a 10-fold increase in volume.
During that first two-hour attempt, NASA engineers detected higher-than-expected pressures inside the BEAM habitat, but later determined it was likely due to the module’s fabric layers sticking together.
The soft-sided, multi-layered Beam measured 7 feet long and almost 8 feet in diameter when delivered to the station by SpaceX last month. When he was done, the BEAM had grown from its compacted 7 feet to 13 feet long (2.1 to 7 meters) and expanded from nearly 8 feet to 10.5 feet in diameter (2.4 to 3.2 m).
Bigelow Aerospace aims to fly inflatable space modules 20 times larger than BEAM that can be leased out to companies and research organizations. First, the BEAM has to be tested out to see how it holds up in space.
NASA said it was the sound of internal straps releasing as the pod swelled in both length and girth.
In all, the habitat will stay attached to the ISS for two years.
The habitat will undergo leak checks for the next week.
Between Thursday and Friday morning, BEAM expanded a little bit more all by itself, which left NASA optimistic that there was nothing actually wrong with it.
The BEAM module was taken to the ISS last month aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship before being installed on the space station’s Tranquility node.
But this time, things went pretty well, with Williams reporting hearing popping sounds at the beginning from BEAM, something “like popcorn in a frying pan”. These will measure how well such expandable habitats are able to withstand the harsh conditions of outer space.
Fully expanded, the module is four metres long by 3.23 metres wide.
NASA said that if the expansion runs into problems in these first tests in space, the astronauts may deflate the habitat and try again in the coming days.
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Throughout the two-year technology demonstration to retrieve sensor data and assess conditions inside the unit, including how well it protects against space radiation, the astronauts are expected to re-enter the module several times, the U.S. space agency said.
