The inflatable room will attach to the International Space Station (ISS) for a two-year test and become the first such habitat to hold humans in orbit.
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The revolutionary pod is made by Bigelow Aerospace and when it will be filled with air by the end of May 2016, it is likely to bloat up to the size of a small bedroom.
SpaceX’s stunningly successful rocket landing on a drone ship Friday (April 8) has won accolades from the highest office in the land, with President Barack Obama hailing the company’s technological feat. NASA plans to keep the airlock between BEAM and the space station closed.
The mission’s number one priority was to send a Dragon capsule full of supplies (including a nifty inflatable habitat) to the ISS, the first mission of its type since SpaceX’s spectacular failure last June.
Traditional booster rockets have always either burned up during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere or crashed into the ocean, never to be used again, but SpaceX’s plan creates a reusable rocket.
SpaceX has now successfully landed a rocket on a drone ship but the company’s next test will be sending a recycled rocket on another trip to space.
After approximately 2 and a half minutes, the main portion of the SpaceX’s two-stage rocket separated and then turned around and headed toward a landing platform located in the middle of the Atlantic around 185 miles northeast of Cape Canaveral.
NASA recently partnered with the private company Bigelow Aerospace to develop the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, also known as BEAM.
SpaceX is still reveling in the success of Friday’s booster landing at sea.
Jeff Bezos, thye billionaire owner of Amazon, owns another space exploration company Blue Origin, which similar to SpaceX, has been working on recovering reusable space delivery systems. NASA, meanwhile, envisions using inflatable habitats during 2030s Mars expeditions.
SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket in December on land after launching a satellite into orbit.
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SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is the only cargo ship capable of returning items to Earth and is expected to play a key role in helping NASA bring back blood samples and other items that were collected by American spaceman Scott Kelly, who returned to Earth in March after spending almost a year in space. An expandable workspace will provide astronauts with the facilities to undertake research on the red planet, without compromising on rocket space.
