Inflatable Space Station Prototype a Success

Adam Weiss writes "The Genesis 1 inflatable space station prototype was launched last week from the Ukraine. Now, after a few days of forced silence, Bigelow Aerospace has announced that the mission is so far a complete success. Their website has a detailed description of the launch, as well as the first picture from the craft. For an account right from mission control, the Museum of Science in Boston has posted an interview with Eric Haakonstad, the Program Manager of the mission."

Comments

Managing space debris

[UR30]

Quote: "After eight years of planning, the actual creation and delivery into space took only nine months." This is fast. Now that space is not for big governments any more, it will be interesting to see what can be done with space. For example, what about debris in orbit, which will be a serious problem. Will space be a business opporturnity for waste-management companies?

Re:Managing space debris

[NTiOzymandias]

For example, what about debris in orbit, which will be a serious problem.

Well they can always build it at a handy Lagrange point so there's at least plenty of room for it to spread out. As a bonus, the orbit would be that much more stable, as well.

Re:Managing space debris

[MrFlibbs]

Ah, but getting to a Lagrange Point requires much more energy and therefore, cost. The shuttle can only achieve low earth orbit, and in fact NASA currently has no operational system to take humans any further than the Internation Space Station.

For a commercial venture, getting people into low earth orbit is the only viable near-term solution. Putting a space hotel at the L5 point is still a long way off.

Re:Managing space debris

[hey!]

Now that space is not for big governments any more, it will be interesting to see what can be done with space.

I agree, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons.

Space exploration will still require government help. But governments, at least democratic ones that operate by consensus, aren't good at small things. By the time everyone's put their two cents in that's a lot of cents and more to the point, a lot of "stakeholders".

Ventures like this, and of course Scaled, are almost too small for a government to do. Such projects are started all the time; some of them bear fruit, but many either are killed before their time or produce no fruit because resources and attention are drained to the massive consensus projects.

On the other hand exploration of the outer planets, a Mars mission (if that makes sense) even a return to the Moon; these kinds of projects are too large for a private entity at the present time.

It's a good time to have two tiers of space exploration and technology development. Private industry will make bring agility, public research will shorten the road to results beyond the horizon of private enterprise. Ideally, these two efforts would end up supporting each other.

Will space be a business opporturnity for waste-management companies?

This, I doubt, unless the cost per pound to escape velocity goes far lower than we have any reason to expect it to. It is likely that the process of shooting trash into space will generate more waste itself than the system could handle.

It is wise, however, to reflect on this: practically every molecule in the waste stream was once a valuable resource that somebody paid good money to obtain. They were materials, found by long and painstaking prospecting, extracted from the Earth by dint of massive investment in machinery and infrastrucure, transformed by subtle chemistry to have valuable properties, and incorporated into the final consumer product. The consumer then takes those molecules, throws them into the trash, whence they may be scattered to the four corners of the earth, perhaps never in concentrations sufficient to warrant recovering.

Relatively few changes in our society would cause those molecules to be redirected back into the production stream. It might not be economical now because it involves a concerted societal effort, but there's not technological reason it can't be.

Good for the space industry.

[Kranfer]

While I knew about this last week (whats with the lag on stories guys?!) I think that this design concept is something that should definately help the private space industry. I have been keeping up with the new private space companies through space.com and other outlets of information over the last year or so and I love this stuff. Not only is this design concept something new and innovative, but it is also paving the way for private stations to be built in space for less than say... the ISS is costing. I am a fan of the ISS as well, don't get me wrong, but this new technology has the potential to making stations much much larger than the ISS and allow for more dare I say it... spacious interiors for research and living quarters... since if you need more space you just launch another module that inflates itself and attach it. Don;t have to wait 2 years for this huge bulky thing to be built and put onto a shuttle to launch it either. Now all they have to do is figure out a way to do this on the moon. It'll be more difficult, as we all know, because of the fact that regolith on the moon is more abrasive... I wonder how this module would do in such conditions... anyone know?

Re:Old News?

[kjorn]

Well, at least they didn't hit the inflate button here on earth as see that some prankster had replaced their space station with the first orbital bouncy castle.

Or some other inflatable, amusing and rude item :O hahaha

Experimental Autopilot checks out positive!

[Ohreally_factor]

I've just received word from my sources at Bigelow Aerospace that their experimental autopilot is working great! This inflatable technology is AWETHOME!

Sirius Cybernetics?

[Max von H.]

From Bigelow's website: "At this point in time, the vehicle is happy and healthy."

Reminds me of some elevators and automatic doors, all very happy to serve.

*chuckles*

Re:Congrats, but...

[I Own Things]

It may look like a weather balloon now, but the next gen. is slated to resemble an absolutely huge woman ;)

Re:Space Debris

[MarkusQ]

anyone have any ideas what being hit by a small piece of space junk,..will do to one of these things?

I can't find a link at the moment, but ground tests showed pretty much what you'd expect--it does much better than a metal can, to roughly the same extent as a modern bullet proof vest out performs a suit of (aluminum) armor in a gun fight.

Yes, there are things that will destroy it. But Kg for Kg, Kevlar is a lot better than aluminum foil at protecting you from small, high speed impacts.

--MarkusQ

Re:Space Debris

[HangingChad]

I think UR30 is on to something, anyone have any ideas what being hit by a small piece of space junk, a piece smaller than my fist but moving at a few hundred miles an hour will do to one of these things?

Millions in engineering and they overlooked that little detail. Time to pack it up and go back to the drawing board.

Of course it would do damage. Just like it would do damage to a conventional space station, the Hubble, shuttle orbiter or anything else in LEO. You'd be lucky if it was only going a few hundred mph. More likely it would be thousands of mph and the effect would be spectacular regardless of what it hits. Anything the size you describe is probably already being tracked, along with burned out motors, dead satellites, wrenches, and pieces of insulation. What's harder to track are paint chips and debris from collisions. One dead Russian sat is leaking blobs of liquid metal.

Here's a good blog on space junk. One proposed solution are satellite robot junk collectors that snag space junk and then deorbit to dispose of it. Make a couple of those a part of every mission. For the big stuff all that's required is slowing it down a few meters per second and the atmosphere takes care of it for you. The problem are things too small to track.

Re:Space Debris

[camperdave]

anyone have any ideas what being hit by a small piece of space junk, a piece smaller than my fist but moving at a few hundred miles an hour will do to one of these things?

It would probably just bounce off. This is not some child's latex balloon we're talking about. The walls consist of five layers of carbon fiber composite. The TransHab module that this thing is based off of had 16 inch thick walls.

More than 50 ballistics tests at the University of Dayton Research Institute and the University of Denver Research Institute were devoted to firing particles of 0.25-5Z8 in. toward the Bigelow shield at velocities from about 1.9-4.3 mi./sec.

"The tests showed we have a shield that performs comparably to NASA's, but at a fraction of the cost," says Brian Aiken, the overall Bigelow program manager. Aiken has extensive experience in satellite design, mostly on military spacecraft at TRW (now Northrop Grumman). Bigelow's Gamble

Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these...

[AngryDill]

It would be like Macys' parade!

-a.d.-

Is this even real?

[JamesTKirk]

OK, we don't have the launch footage because someone knocked over the camera(!?!?). And we lost contact right after launch because of a power outage. But here's a really blurry picture to prove it's up there.

Also, our business model is that if we just get it up there someone else will... um... well, rent it or lease it for something. You know, it's just like building a strip mall. If you just build the space, someone else will pay to occupy it or use it to advertise. Except, of course, that this is in space where people can't really get to or see.

This story is so sketchy, and the web site is so cheesey, I'm tempted to think this whole thing is fake. I know it's been in the news before, but so has the Phantom console. At best, it sounds like some crackpot in Real Estate came up with a stupid but futuristic sounding idea, and managed to get a lot of funding for it.

The only possible use I can see for this is to lease it to NASA. NASA could save money by abandoning the ISS and use this for a lower cost. Of course NASA ran out of useful experiments to do a long time ago, so I don't know what they would actually use this for, but it would be cheaper than what they're doing now.

You have GOT to be kidding

[jeffmeden]

From TFA:
Las Vegas, We Have a Problem
Just as the anticipated time of SpaceQuest's contact with the Genesis I was approaching, a major storm caused power outages in much of the Arlington area. SpaceQuest, which was to receive the first communication from Genesis I and relay it to Las Vegas, had no power. Now, there was a little more than 30 minutes before SpaceQuest controllers were supposed to hear a cry of life from the Genesis I, but there was no life in the receivers in Virginia.

They are trying to manage a SPACEFLIGHT and they don't have a simple backup power source? Don't book my ticket just yet please...

From the Site's Marketing Questionnaire...

[johnthorensen]

4. If you had the opportunity to play a free game of bingo coming directly to you from the spacecraft with the possibility to win prizes, how often would you visit the site?

WTF? Space Bingo? What kind of circus clown is running Bigelow Aerospace if this is their idea for making piles of cash with a manned spacecraft? And who the hell thought the target market for an aerospace venture would be my 70-year-old grandmother?

Just goes to show why nerds work on the tech end of things, not the marketing...

-JT

The limits of human imagination

[E 99]

When Arthur C. Clarke imagined that in 2001 we would build an artificial computer intelligence that would turn homicidal in order to wrest control of a spacecraft, and that in 2010 we would land on a moon made entirely of diamond, people thought that sounded plausible and cool.

On the other hand, if someone had proposed at that time that in 2006 a spacecraft would launch from the Ukraine called "Genesis 1", and that mission control in Las Vegas would lose power at the last minute and would have to run an extension cord to the restaurant across the street for power, people would have thought that was the stupidest, most implausible thing they had ever heard.