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"May 3
Space Inflatable Project Eyed by Bigelow Aerospace
Here's a big idea…meant to get bigger once in space.
An inflatable space structure project is moving forward at Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nevada. Tagged as the Genesis Pathfinder, the hardware is now slated for launch late next year.
Once in Earth orbit, the one-third scale hardware is to produce important data regarding multiple features of a full-scale spacecraft.
The Bigelow Aerospace work is led by entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, owner of Las Vegas-based Budget Suites of America Hotel Chain.
The space firm is keen on spurring private ownership and use of space stations by making habitable space modules affordable for corporate communities. Under several agreements with NASA, Bigelow is drawing upon NASA's TransHab inflatable structures program, although the private company is pioneering its own design.
NASA's TransHab(Click to Enlarge)
"Our goal is to create a new cost paradigm for space station construction. We intend to so reduce costs of station habitable structure as to make the difference between space stations being only government available or having space stations affordable for general business ownership," explains the company's website.
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Hmmmm... Care to elaborate?
Bigelows]http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/index.html]Bigelow's site stays numb about details, the best i found was http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/002873.html]This Blog discussing Bigelow... But the info is quite dated....
(EDIT:) There's a link in the Blog from 1999 wich is quite an interesting read: http://usspaceport.com/bigelow.htm]About Bigelow's vision. Remarkable guy, very private, in it for the long run...
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i thought the article said it all; this company plans on putting up an inflatable space station rocketed from an x-prizer group.
i did find your links very good reading; nice to know somebody is doing something; i wonder if he'd get into my network machine ideas for bootstrapping industrialism without having to spend any money . . . i suppose your going to want me to explain that one!
O.K. my idea is network of renewable energy powered machine tools that feedback on themselves to fix themselves and to make more of themselves or even variants, or to even improve themselves. Because they are taking in energy and could use that energy and materials to make more of them, they grow and develop without money(unless you wanted to accellerate things by bringing in already processed materials. This way, we can build our science and technology without asking for a public that has better things to worry about than our dreams of space.
I'm starting to spill these ideas out a lot more because i want to start accellerating things and I can't get into this anytime soon . . . .
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Sounds like some of the nanotechnology ideas but on a macro level.
Interesting, and more do-able in my mind.
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well, i hope you can tell and get somebody into this that can do something now instead of waiting for me to get rich somehow . . . .
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