I get dizzy trying to track the ins and outs and absolute inanities of commercial space flights.
Now, one of the more “Out There” creations has actually been given ISS time:
He has come up with an inflatable “room” which he envisions as hotel rooms in space.
Forget the “four minutes of weightlessness” - spend your Honeymoon orbiting Mars!
Is this as insane as it looks or is it actually possible to create a radiation-proof, space-junk-proof, meteorite-proof room the size of a Prius and pop it open in space?
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing crazy about it. Bigelow didn’t invent the technology, it bought the patents for the TransHab system from NASA after Congress made them stop developing it themselves.
It might help to think of it less as “inflatable life raft” and more “multi-layer kevlar body armour”.
Exactly. After a quick coffee-hasn’t-hit-my-brain-yet morning googling, here’s a description of the layers used by the earlier Transhab design:
There’s another website of indeterminate authority herewhich goes into more detail on the properties of every layer. If it’s correct, there’s actually additional kevlar layers backing each of the air bladders and the Nomex layer.
In comparison, the current ISS modules have walls consisting of only 1/4 inch of aluminum plus a layer or two of Kevlar (IIRC). I know I’d rather have the Transhab material between me any any bullets or micrometeorites…
In fairness, the ISS has been occupied for over 15 years without serious incident (I’m pretty sure we’d have heard if anyone died). It’s protected by a variety of Whipple shields, which is my favourite name for anything space-related. Whipple shield. Whipple, whipple, whipple.
Inflatable habitats are a good way to get past the problem of limits on launch vehicle payload envelopes or the extreme difficulty of constructing large non-modular structures in space. Note that the hull of the BE330 isn’t just a single layer like a balloon, or even a few different layers of material as in a pressure suit; the hull inflatees by pressure and expansion of material within the wall, so it is tens of centimeters in thickness. This provides both good insulation against thermal radiation and greater distance for particle that spallate on the outer surface to be absorbed; in fact I’ve seen some concepts for “inflatables” which fill the interstitial space with water and/or human waste which actually provides a pretty good barrier against charged particle radiation.
Ultimately, if and when we decide to construct very large, O’Neill-type habitats in orbital space, it probably makes sense to use an inflatable shell that is then filled in with ice or silicate material from space resources to create a shell. I’ve proposed such a design myself that could be scaled up to the limits of the material strength of carbon fiber or other reinforcing material laid within a matrix of water ice/short fiber silicates, filled with water up to a 30 meter or greater depth, and with ‘islands’ basically offering terrestrial conditions of temperature, atmosphereic pressure, background radiation, et cetera. Trying to fabricate metallic structures the way we build ocean ships or skyscrapers is probably not workable in freefall for numerous reasons, and hauling up refined metals, much less construction forms and structural members is just too costly to do on a large scale.