Artist’s impression of NASA’s Curiosity Rover descending into Gale Crater in August 2012.
Inflatable space technology represents the future of space travel, says a Lockheed Martin vice president who sees such innovative engineering eventually being used for everything from lunar habitats to human-rated interplanetary spacecraft.
Inflatable habitats usher in the capability to build space environments with less weight, more volume and fewer launches than traditional metallic, hard-sided structures, says Lockheed Martin.
Although inflatable habitats are still very much a novel alternative when it comes to human-rated missions, Kirk Shireman, Vice-President for Lockheed Martin Lunar Exploration Campaigns, told me that at some point, inflatable spacecraft will be used to send astronauts to Mars and beyond.
To support his claim, Shireman, a former International Space Station (ISS) program manager, points to the resilience and success of NASA’s BEAM (The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module) habitat which is still functional and attached to the ISS some six years after its installation.
It was designed for a two-year life, Shireman told me. The resilience of this type of structure is important for our future as a spacefaring nation, he says.
Lockheed Martin and several of its competitors are already actively developing new inflatable technology.
Earlier this month, Lockheed Martin successfully tested a prototype of an inflatable habitat that it says will likely see use on the lunar surface by the end of this decade. The test, which took place at a historic Titan rocket hot-fire test stand outside Littleton, Colo., surpassed all requirements and expectations. Thus, Shireman envisions this new prototype being used in the next phase of lunar exploration.
Lockheed Martin’s inflatable scale habitat used in a burst test on Dec. 7, 2022 in Colorado.
This prototype is essentially a third the size of the habitat that would be installed on the lunar surface, says Shireman.
The testing involved using an ordinary nitrogen tanker truck to fill the inflatable test prototype to the limit.
We drove a truck up there and started pumping the prototype with high-pressure nitrogen, says Shireman. The goal was to reach about 180 psi before the inflatable prototype burst, but we achieved some 285 psi, he says.
The material that is used for the structure is five times stronger than steel and ten times stronger than aluminum on a weight for weight basis, says Lockheed Martin. Material properties of our soft goods structure is also less susceptible than metallics when it comes to long term creep (deformation) and fracture, the company says.
Once outside Earth’s atmosphere, Shireman says that unlike metallic structures, an inflatable spacecraft’s or habitat’s volume can be expanded, which creates a lot more room in which to live and work.
Inflatables provide more volume per mass than other habitat technologies, says Shireman.
Such expandable habitats are lighter than metallics for the same volume, says Lockheed Martin. As a result, Lockheed Martin says that additional radiation protection can be added, providing a critical safety improvement over metallic structures. Inflatable structures are also thought to be better at countering deep space Galactic Cosmic Radiation than metallic spacecraft.
Inflatables can be every bit as safe, or even safer than a metallic structure when dealing with high speed, high velocity small particles, like micro meteorites and orbital debris, says Shireman.
As for the material from which this prototype is constructed?
You typically have a metallic core, and the soft goods are basically an ingenious cloth weave, says Shireman. The material is not even that exotic; it’s really all in how you put it together, he says.
Shireman says that new materials technologies and new analytical tools have enabled such inflatable space habitat technology to finally come of age. But he says the driving factor behind it all is the need for more volume per mass, something which inflatable technology can easily offer.
Volume is king, says Shireman. The farther away and the longer humans must live in space, the more volume they will need, he says. We think the future for long term habitats in space is going to be inflatable —- whether it’s low-Earth orbit, the lunar surface, the lunar vicinity, or farther out into the solar system than we have ever gotten, says Shireman.
“We have visions of sending humans beyond the Moon and on to Mars in this type of habitat,” said Shireman. “And there’s no reason why we can’t.”
