NASA Beam: Astronauts enter an inflatable space station habitat for the first time

It's more complicated than packing a bouncy castle into a rocket

When it comes to space travel, the mass and volume a spacecraft can carry is extremely limited, especially when human astronauts are involved. This is extremely inconvenient given that human astronauts require habitats once they reach outer space which are likely to be large and heavy. As a result, scientists have developed an inflatable habitat which can be compacted for launch and expanded once in space, and astronauts on the International Space Station have recently entered it for the first time.

Called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (Beam), the inflatable habitat was created by a company called Bigelow Aerospace and was launched to the space station on April 8th by a SpaceX Dragon capsule. After being robotically removed from the Dragon capsule, the habitat was then attached to the space station, however, the road to inflating it hasn’t been smooth.

BEAM was originally supposed to be inflated on May 26th, but after a two hour effort saw the module expand at a much slower rate than it should NASA ended the attempt. Two days later they tried again with more success, with NASA astronaut Jeff Williams expanding the habitat to five times its compressed size over a period of seven hours.

On June 6th, the hatch to BEAM was opened for the first time and Williams, alongside Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, became its first visitors. Williams and Skripochka aren’t staying inside BEAM for extended periods just yet, instead the two gathered data on the condition of the habitat, reporting it as being in “pristine” condition, before leaving and closing the hatch behind them.

Over the next two years NASA and Bigelow will test the module’s ability to withstand extreme temperatures, radiation, and high velocity impacts as well as have the astronauts occasionally enter BEAM to perform inspections on its internal conditions. After the two years of testing is complete, BEAM will be released from the space station and left to burn up during its descent through the Earth’s atmosphere.

This marks the start of a long period of research but all of the data gathered from these inspections will be used to determine the durability of expandable habitats and help Bigelow develop even larger versions so that astronauts can have larger living and working spaces without taking up room on the rocket upon launch. If tests continue to progress positively it’s likely that these habitats will become an essential part of future space missions.