Saturday, July 3, 2010

Inflatable Habitats For Space - A Business Innovation Whose Time Hath Cometh

With all the new materials it seems that we could make better use of inflatable designs for space, luckily NASA and others are looking into this. Not long ago, I was discussing this with someone online in an Internet style think tank and he had asked me; "Have you seen the latest NASA idea, inflatable ships/bases?"

"Yes," I said, and "I've been watching Bigelow Aerospace space exploits closely for many years, they have the materials needed to do it on a large scale. It makes a lot of sense, float-fly it up to the upper atmosphere and then propel it where you want it.

And yet, he asked another question which I am sure is on everyone's mind; "which if the connotations are correct could prove to be susceptible to meteors."

Yes, that is a consideration, still, some of these materials are pretty strong when layered in a composite fashion, and such materials might even be used to catch space debris like a net too. Much stronger than steel and layered like composites, they may even be able to withstand small asteroids.

Of course, to give my acquaintance the proper credit he did add a caveat to his prior statement; "I'm sure it's a bit more thought out then a bouncy castle in the sky. At least I hope it is."

Still that is pretty funny, ha ha ha, yes, I can see it now? Rental bouncy castles for your space party vacation - what is privatized space coming too. We all got a laugh out of that and he'd mentioned that he was having an interesting dialogue with some MIT students in the math program about contemplating the probability and risk factors based on sizes and trajectories of asteroids to see if it made sense based on the durability of the materials.

Indeed, this will be a critical decision making factor for any lunar colony using such technology, so please consider all this.

By : Lance_Winslow

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