Private Inflatable Room Launching to Space Station Next Year

The “Bigelow Expandable Activity Module” will go up next year on a SpaceX “Dragon” capsule and will, if successful, add some much needed habitation volume to the ISS. It is a fairly small module, however. Doesn’t seem to have windows.

This Bigelow PR video shows the BEAM, along with the BA 330 stand alone inflatable space station. Put a few of those together connected by a truss and tumble ’em end-over-end to generate “artificial gravity,” and maybe finally there will be a truly useful space station, good for studying something other than just how bad long term needless weightlessness is on the human body.

If you have a rotating “bar bell” of habs connected to a non-rotating core station, that would permit the study of what we *really* need to study: the long term impacts of variable G levels. We already know that zero G is bad enough that we’ll almost certainly never accomplish much using crews subjected to it non-stop over long periods. But how about crews who spend part of their day in zero G, and part at, say, 1/10 G?

Since the BEAM can be carried up with a Dragon, this leads promptly to the obvious speculation about launching a Dragon and a BEAM somewhere *other* than the ISS. Lunar flybys, asteroid rendezvous, etc. using the BEAM as a sizable mission module.

[youtube isQU84Kc0Y0]