When astronauts orbit the moon, or live on its surface in the decade ahead, they will probably be doing so inside inflatable space lodges now in development.
Dozens of NASA officials and veteran astronauts are wrapping up a review of five space habitat mockups built by different companies.
The mockups offer the U.S. space agency ideas for an ideal Gateway – the planned research outpost in lunar orbit that will house and transfer astronauts to the surface of the moon.
“The whole point is to define what we like and what we don’t like about these different habitats,” NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, principal investigator for the testing campaign, said.
He and his team were making a final inspection recently in Las Vegas, Nevada at the headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace, a space habitat company founded by hotel chain billionaire Robert Bigelow.
U.S. Vice President, Mike Pence, in March told NASA to land its first crew of astronauts on the moon by 2024.
That accelerated timeline spawned the space agency’s Artemis program, which calls for privately built lunar landers, robotic rovers and a Lunar Gateway – a modular space station in orbit around the Moon with living quarters for astronauts, a lab for science and research and ports for visiting spacecraft.
“Gateway is an opportunity to test all these structures in a deep space environment… as a prelude to going to Mars,” Bigelow said.
“Potentially we think that for the rest of this century, the expandable architecture is where it’s at.”
Bigelow’s B330 habitat, launched from Earth compacted inside a rocket, is made of a fabric-like material designed to shield inhabitants from deep space radiation and high-speed space debris.
Once docked alongside other Gateway modules in lunar orbit, the habitat unfurls into two-story, 55-foot-long (16-meter-long) outpost that up to six astronauts could stay in.
The lunar space habitat and colonization program is expected to cost over a billion dollars through 2028
