The Rise of Private Actors in the Space Sector by Alessandra Vernile

Author:Alessandra Vernile
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.3.2 Space Habitats: Bigelow Aerospace

Next to space tourism is the idea of building in-space settlements, considered pure sci-fi until ten years ago. The inflatable or expandable habitats are pressurised structures capable of supporting life in outer space, expanding their internal volume after launch.

From a technological standpoint, inflatable structures were developed in the 1990s and some operational applications have been deployed in space for large reflectors for instance. The idea of building inflatable habitats in space has been in the minds of entrepreneurs specialised in earthly hotels since the 1960s, when the first project of a lunar hotel was projected by Barron Hilton from the hotel chain of the same name, and Goodyear. The project was not considered safe and NASA abandoned the idea until the 1990s, when President George H. W. Bush created the Space Exploration Initiative68 that allowed NASA to plan a crewed mission to Mars and to design a space station to take astronauts there. In this framework, NASA looked again at the inflatable habitat scheme and elaborated the TransHab, destined for manned missions to Mars. TransHab did not get Congressional support and the 2000 NASA Authorization Act then cancelled the project.69

In parallel, the entrepreneur Robert Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace to start working on expandable habitats. Robert Bigelow had made his fortune through ownership of the hotel chain Budget Suite of America. He decided to create his own company because of his passion for extra-terrestrial activities, and decided to give voice to his intuition of building a hotel in space after he stumbled on the aforementioned TransHab.70

When TransHab was cancelled, Bigelow licensed the intellectual property rights to a new project taking NASA’s grounds into account. Following his own philosophy, Bigelow’s priority was to reduce the costs of habitable structures to ensure the feasibility of commercial exploitation. As for many other start-ups in commercial space, Bigelow planned to cut costs on manufacturing as well as on access to space. His initial commitment was $500 million of his personal wealth. In his business plan, Bigelow outsourced the launches to others, bought off the shelf hardware and excluded the public sector from the manufacturing phase. He also contrived to avoid paying fuel costs to maintain the habitat’s orbital location.71

When the TransHab project was formally withdrawn, Bigelow applied to license the technology against an initial $400,000 fee and a commitment for a higher amount to further develop his project, which included the involvement of the experts who were in charge of the TransHab project. His first prototype of an inflatable habitat was the Genesis I, launched in 2006 on board a Russian launcher, followed in 2007 by Genesis II. Both prototypes were successful.

After the first successful launch, Bigelow continued to develop the technology, redesigning the module from fabric layers and obtained 15 patents in expandable habitats. This development led to new investments that he supported personally. In particular after the launch of Genesis I, he invested $75 million in proprietary extension of the technology from NASA, and another $180 million by 2010 that allowed the company to grow further.

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