FUTURE TECH
Have you achieved all your travel goals on Earth? If so, a space-based outpost could be your next trip
After Apollo 8 made the first flight around the Moon during Christmas 1968, Pan American Airways opened a waiting list for a planned service to the Moon. Over 93,000 people signed up for the list, and it only closed when Pan Am folded in 1991. While this early optimism failed to deliver, there are now a number of projects working towards private space stations, and they do have space tourism and space hotels as part of their plans. One of the biggest leaders was Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas, funded by a hotel billionaire, before its closure in 2021.
Robert Bigelow made his fortune building the Budget Suites of America chain of hotels. Interested in space technology since childhood, he started Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 to take on a NASA concept for inflatable space modules that had been cancelled in the early 1990s. Bigelow’s intention was to build, operate and sell access to private space stations using these inflatable modules. The company launched its first test crafts, Genesis I and II, into space in 2006 and 2007. Though it subsequently pursued ground testing while waiting for private access to space to develop, Bigelow went full circle and launched its first piloted module for NASA to bolt on to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2016.
In the long term, Bigelow intended to launch modules that would be packed into a rocket’s nose cone and then inflated once in orbit. Bigelow had official expressions of interest from seven different countries, including the UK, about accessing these facilities once they were in place. But because the access was privately arranged for profit, there’s now interest in using modules like these for space tourism, so we could see the first space hotel in the near future.
While the now-defunct company won’t conquer outer space, Bigelow’s space hotel concept could still live on, where it would make use of existing resources. A SpaceX Dragon capsule could launch tourists into the outer atmosphere. With careful timing you could catch up with a space station hotel in only a few orbits. After docking, you would float out of your seat and drift into the core of your module. Bigelow-style modules expand into pod-shaped units. Even though these are inflatable, the walls are thick, made of multiple layers of ballistic, thermal and radiation protection. Despite being a balloon, it can provide greater protection against debris and radiation than the rigid modules of the ISS. Windows haven’t always been a designer’s first thought – the Project Mercury astronauts had to demand one and the US
