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Built last year, the 80,000 square-foot facility houses full-scale mock-ups of Bigelow’s dream: the Nautilus space station module. Two 45-foot-long, 22-foot-diameter modules, brilliant white and draped with the American flag. A stairway invites visitors to climb on board to see for themselves what it might be like to live in the biggest space station modules ever built. Their large volume is the result of an unusual design feature—they are inflatable.
Developed at NASA as part of a project called TransHab, inflatable space station modules have some important advantages over their tin can counterparts. They weigh significantly less, and they launch in a compressed state, with their fabric hulls wrapped tightly around their rigid cores like a roll of paper towels. This allows them to use less powerful launch vehicles and makes for roomier space stations. After a rocket fires Nautilus into space, explosive bolts release the girdle securing the compressed hull, and the the station’s life support system, housed in the core, will inflate the structure with breathable air, expanding it from 15 feet in diameter to 22 feet. Power comes from solar panels that unfold from the rigid bulkheads at each end of the module. Each bulkhead aslo houses an airlock and docking adaptor. Astronauts arriving later enter a shirtsleeve environment in which they can go to work unpacking removable panels, equipment and supplies from the core to create three levels of living and working space. A docked rocket engine called a multi-directional propulsion bus (MDBP) will eventually allow the station to maneuver within Earth’s orbit or even leave it, for say, a trip to the moon.
This basic architecture was created by NASA senior engineer William Schneider, in an effort that began in 1997. The design won numerous converts at NASA, with then administrator Daniel Goldin calling it a major breakthrough. For a while, it was seriously considered as an alternative to the International Space Station Habitation Module under development at the time by Boeing. But TransHab was cancelled without explanation in 2000, before it could produce flight-ready hardware.
After TransHab was cancelled, Bigelow bought the exclusive development rights from NASA and entered into a Space Act Agreement with the agency to allow him to work with former TransHab engineers still employed there. And he tracked down Schneider, by then retired from NASA and teaching at Texas A&M University. Schneider was surprised when he got the call, but he agreed to see for himself what Bigelow was up to. The modules Bigelow has on display, though empty except for floors and structural elements, had their intended effect on Schneider. “And god,” he recalls now, “when I walked in here, boom! It was mind-boggling, because this is the vision that I really wanted. Here’s these things, all sitting there, and of course some of them are mock-ups, but the rest were inflatable, and I said, ‘Man, he’s serious. He’s not playing around.’ ” These days Schneider and his former TransHab colleagues visit the plant every few weeks to provide guidance to Bigelow’s engineers. For Schneider, it’s a chance to follow through on some unfinished business. “It’s kind of like you want to see you child grow up to maturity,” he says, “not be stopped in its adolescence.”
Schneider has no doubt that Nautilus will be in orbit by 2010. He compares Bigelow with another wildly successful mogul who had aerospace interests: “Bob is like Howard Hughes reincarnated. He’s not just a financial person; he’s in the middle of everything that we do.”
Dr. William Schneider
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