Clark Lindsey says that he’s going to announce six customers (countries) for his orbital facilities. Right now it appears that SpaceX and Boeing/ULA are the most likely providers for transportation, but it’s unclear whether it’s enough business to close the business case for either of them, let alone both. Commercial Crew will help a lot, of Congress doesn’t screw it up. Unfortunately, screwing it up would be the way to bet.
17 thoughts on “Bigelow Business Prospects”
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One thing I’m looking forward to is the humor value of seeing a South Korean or German astronaut having far more spacious and modern facilities in space than the American astronauts on ISS. And the fact that those superior & cheaper services come from the American private sector, rather than a foreign nation like Russia or China, will completely hamstring the ability of NASA boosters to demand more funding.
As for SpaceX’s business case, aren’t the rockets fully paid for by the transport of cargo and satellites? I would think human transport would just be gravy. Or is the R&D cost of Dragon really that high?
It’s at least $300M to get it ready for crew, which is almost as much as they spent on Falcon 9 development.
Rand, is that $300M to get to to “commercial ready for crew” or “NASA-approved ready for crew”?
Here is an article from the Huntsville Times yesterday about Bigelow’s visit to ULA in Decatur.
http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/10/post_432.html
at least $300M to get it ready for crew
They’ve stated that Dragon itself is as complicated as an F9. I’m wondering if two other factors are involved. One is they now have 1100 employees and the burn rate associated with that. Second is if they’ve just wised up in the way they report amounts.
ULA seems to think all 24 annual flights will be theirs, but SpaceX already has some Bigelow (non specific) on their manifest.
My contrarian view is that a NASA commercial crew deal for EELV to ISS would result in Bigelow and his sovereign client customers paying more rather than less for EELV crew service to this private station.
Is Spacequest still working for Bigelow?
Has Bigelow published any endurance estimates? I know Transhab had a requirement for around a year and a half.
I am predicting India as one of them.
…and if I am right, I want a cookie too dammit!
A big, chocolate chip cookie with no nuts!
i kind of wonder what a country would have a person do up there. seems like you’d have to have a big science team on the ground thinking of stuff to make it worth while.
does india have any experiments they they’re itching to do in space?
i wonder what the price difference would be for canada, japan type iss partners for sending one man or woman to bigelow v iss
SpaceX cargo is $133M per flight.
SpaceX has said commercial crew would be about $20M a seat which gives an all up per flight cost of $140M which is in the same ball park for essentially the same vehicles.
That’s the cost to NASA.
Presumably its the same for Bigelow.
Bigelow has said he wants 2nd source for everything so he is always going to have 2 crew and 2 cargo suppliers. Minimum.
He is talking 24 flights a year. But if he puts the two Bigelow stations close, say 100km apart each crew and cargo flight could visit both stations in one flight. Visit A, undock and fly on to B before returning home.
That would give almost fortnightly flights to station in some combination of crew and cargo flights.
It could be 12 manned flights a year and 12 cargo flights a year, or mostly cargo depending on requirements.
It’s starting to look seriously useful.
@Presley Cannady re “…has Bigelow published any endurance estimates? I know Transhab had a requirement for around a year and a half.”
The technical claims I’ve seen in occasional published reports is that the expandable module technology meteorite orbital debris shield is more, not less, effective than the aluminum can technology in the traditional manned spacecraft. So while NASA/TransHab may have had a design goal of 1 1/2 years duration, there is no particular reason I can think of why the Bigelow technology would necessarily aim for such a low goal.
Moreover, I believe Bigelow has continued technology development work on the original TransHab technology licensed from NASA. Some of the layers are new/better, and I believe I read there may be more layers in the Bigelow than in TransHab. I would project Beigelow was not aiming to decrease the effectiveness/robustness of the technology these past ten years.
Net, I don’t think we should conflate a NASA design goal of 1 1/2 years with the (probably unpublished) design goal for the Bigelow Commercial Space Station.
I kind of wonder what a country would have a person do up there
That’s kind of the point; figuring out what the potential of zero-g is to manufacturing. I’ve worked with some material engineers that would love to take a shot at that. It’s a lot more than just ball bearings.
Even if there is some environmental issue in space that could cause a Bigelow habitat to delaminate or whatever, the fact that it’s under compression (by expansion) should keep it structurally sound don’t you think?
So what would limit it’s life? How much temperature or other stress would it take to turn some of it’s material to powder to the point of structural failure?
@Ken Anthony
I think the actual design life is unknown and unknowable, at least until more samples of the modules with the expandable walls have been orbiting for many more years. Currently, Bigelow has two expandable-technology prototype modules that have been on-orbit for several years, Genesis I and Genesis II, launched in 2006 and 2007, respectively. As far as I know, they are both still holding their atmospheres at this time.
Engineers who attempt to project design life will necessarily base their projections on experience of other long-duration spacecraft with large and small orbital debris over the years, earthside testing of the layered Bigelow orbital-debris-shield with hypersonic-speed particles of various sizes, and the limited data they have from more than seven on-orbit years of the two Bigelow prototypes.
A key design feature for robustness of any Bigelow space station is that, just like the ISS, it will be composed of multiple modules with separable environmental controls and airlocks before long-term human habitation is offered. If a mid-sized piece of orbital debris did puncture the wall of a single module, and the atmosphere could no longer be maintained over a period of minutes or hours, the astronauts would simply move to one of the other two or three expanded Bigelow modules, or retreat to one of the attached spacecraft, and close the airlocks behind them. Obviously, an even more catastrophic collision is possible, one that would not allow time to relocate to another module or would perhaps tear the station apart; but years of empirical data from thousands of spacecraft in LEO show that such an occurrence is a very low probability event.
@Galtish bus driver
Sounds reasonable. I’m so glad he put the Genesis in orbit to counter arguments with no evidence put forth by so many. We can assume some air loss by whatever means over time which can be replaced. This would mean the volume changes over time causing some physical stress to the material.
I think you have to ignore catastrophic failure outside of modularization as you suggest. This is why I recommended a ship design using seven Bigelow BA330 (clustered six around one) for a general purpose ship and why I recommend several ships go at the same time for long duration (mars or other) missions.
I don’t see why we can’t build a ship that could last for hundreds of years (amortizing the cost to an attractive level) with components that are swapped out from time to time. It’s not like we have a spacewar driving up the technology requirements. Chemical reactions give us 300 sec to 450 sec of specific impulse. So a ship holding 10x fuel to ship mass has a respectable delta V of 7.15 to 10.5 km/s with the lower range allowing for long term fuel storage (methane makes mars a relatively cheap fuel source.)
The only thing holding us back is economic incentive which could be brought in force if we just put NASA in position as a consumer and give ownership to those (many in competition) that can exploit.