A Destination Waiting For A Means To Get There
Or, you can't get there from here. Robert Bigelow, head of private space venture Bigelow Aerospace is aiming to have a human-habitable space station in low earth orbit by late 2009 or early 2010. The one tiny problem is that there is currently no way to get a crew there.
SAN JOSE, Calif.—If the planned Jan. 30 launch of Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis 2 space module on a Russian Dnepr rocket is successful, Las Vegas entrepreneur Robert Bigelow plans to send a human-rated habitat into orbit in either the second half of 2009 or the first half of 2010.
Bigelow's Genesis 1 module was launched July 12 and continues to provide data on its condition in low Earth orbit. But while it is hosting some experiments, Genesis 1 – and Genesis 2 – will not be capable of supporting low Earth orbit space tourism, Bigelow's ultimate goal.
But the module Bigelow plans to launch at the end of the decade would be capable of supporting visiting crews of up to three people.
At a luncheon speech today in San Jose, Calif., at the AIAA Space 2006 Symposium, Bigelow said his third module, dubbed Sundancer, would have a mass of 8,618.4 kilograms and be equipped with life support systems, attitude control, three windows, on-orbit maneuverability, reboost and de-orbit capability.
He plans to place it at an altitude of 250 nautical miles at an orbital inclination of 40 degrees. Bigelow said that while Sundancer will be a scale model of the large, human-rated habitat he eventually plans to launch into orbit, it will nonetheless have 180 cubic meters of habitable space.
"We're pretty damn serious," Bigelow said in his lunch address.
Initially Sundancer will require a six-to-nine month period to check out all of its onboard systems. After that, Bigleow said, Sundancer would be able to stay in orbit for several years, which may be necessary since he acknowledged that at present there are no commercially available spacecraft designed to take humans into orbit.
Sundancer will, in effect, be a destination waiting for a means to get there.
I've posted about the Genesis I before here, here and here. You have to hand it to him, he's pushing pretty hard on this idea.
By guy, Saturday, 23 September , 2006 @ 10:23 am
“Las Vegas entrepreneur Robert Bigelow”
He’s following a previous model - build a Vegas in the desert and the highways will get built.
Of course, it didn’t work out the best for Bugsy Siegel but, hey, gotta roll the dice.