Bigelow Aerospace expanding

Next Big Future has the deets:

Bigelow Aerospace is adding a 185,000 square foot expansion to its production plant in North Las Vegas. This represents the birth of a global industry. It is way beyond research and development. It’s a production facility for spacecraft, a factory for building habitats for use on the moon, or Mars, or beyond. There are three spacecraft, three production lines and an assembly plant.

This is a good sign. NASA has been talking about adding a Bigelow module to the space station. This will be a good way to both stimulate the budding private space station building group, and to get some real data on how well they work in addition to the two smaller modules Bigelow has launched and monitored already.

Because Bigelow has plans for a module that would have more space (2 times) in its interior than the entire current ISS station, though the next step, planned for sometime in the next five years, is a smaller manned station. Though that may be pushed back for the ISS bolt on model.

Either way, fascinating developments.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on February 7th 2011 at 10:20 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.