Next week, astronauts on the International Space Station are getting a brand new room.
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“Up next is the scheduled launch of the SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply vehicle on April 8 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida”, NASA officials reported on their website. But unlike the rest of the station, which is built from hulking great aluminium cans, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be carried to orbit folded neatly inside a SpaceX cargo capsule. Instead, four times a year an astronaut will enter it and conduct a few hours’ worth of tests to see how the prototype fares in microgravity, analyzing radiation, pressure, temperature and the general status and structure of the habitat. “That’s where expandable technology comes in”, NASA said in a blog post.
When it is fully expanded BEAM should measure some 13-feet (4 meters) in length and approximately 10.5 feet (roughly 3 meters) in diameter. The company’s next project, the B330, hopes to bring them closer to this goal, which is an inflatable habitat that will have 12,000 cubic feet and operate in lower Earth orbit.
NASA, meanwhile, paid Bigelow Aerospace $17.8 million for the upcoming test flight, making the BEAM the most affordable module ever launched to the space station, said Michael Gold, director of operations and business growth for Bigelow Aerospace.
The 1,400-kg (3,086-lb) experimental habitat module is meant to test the feasibility of expandable module technology, which could provide living and working areas for astronauts, while reducing launch costs.
Friday’s launch will be an unmanned re-supply mission to the International Space Station, delivering supplies and scientific experiments to the station. The habitat will be attached to the Tranquility module and will stay for two years.
Since joining the crew of the ISS, Peake has done a lot of things – from cooking scrambled eggs and brewing coffee to doing a space walk and presenting an award to Adele at the Brits, via a video link. All of these experiments will find their way to orbit via the latest version of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The company plans to create commercial space hotels in the future.
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The FT (Full Thrust) version of the Falcon 9 that will be used to launch Dragon is the baseline for the company’s new Falcon Heavy booster which is slated to be launched from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A as early as the third quarter of this year (2016).
