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Bigelow Aerospace unveils B330 inflatable module mock-up

Accepted submission by Anonymous Coward at 2019-09-13 01:35:51
Techonomics

https://www.businessinsider.com/bigelow-aerospace-mars-transporter-inside-interior-pictures-photos-2019-9 [businessinsider.com]

Hotel mogul Robert Bigelow wants to take his idea to build inflatable space habitats [businessinsider.com] and run with it — apparently, all the way to the moon and Mars.

On Thursday, the billionaire publicly unveiled Bigelow Aerospace [bigelowaerospace.com]'s latest model of an expandable space station prototype, called the "Bigelow Mars Transporter Testing Unit." The mock-up has the volume of four 40-foot-long cargo containers and was built in part for NASA astronauts and engineers to try it out.

Bigelow's immediate goal is to convince NASA — which is testing prototypes made by four other companies [nasa.gov]— to fund a space-worthy unit, called the B330 [bigelowaerospace.com] (so named because it would have 330 cubic meters of volume). The work is in support of the space agency's $20-30 billion [businessinsider.com] moon-landing program, called Artemis.


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