Bigelow Commercial Space Station

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bigelow Next-Generation Commercial Space Station began as a simple question: what if the next great outpost in orbit was not built by a government but by a hotel developer from Las Vegas? Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, spent the 2000s and 2010s working toward exactly that. His company envisioned expandable modules that could be inflated in space, snapped together, and leased out to sovereign nations and private visitors at prices starting in the tens of millions of dollars. The station even had a name for its first configuration: Space Complex Alpha. Before any of that could happen, Bigelow needed a ride to orbit. And that dependency on other people's rockets would prove to be the binding problem his company never fully solved.

• 2. From Hotel Rooms to Orbit

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  CSS Skywalker was the name Bigelow gave its first formal concept, released in 2005. It was described plainly as "an effort to build the planet's first orbiting space hotel," with a projected room rate of USD$1 million per night. The plan called for multiple Nautilus habitat modules, each of which was also known as the B330, to be launched separately and then inflated and connected once in orbit. A component called the Multi-Directional Propulsion Module would have allowed the station to be repositioned toward interplanetary or lunar trajectories. Bigelow had hoped to launch the first Nautilus module by 2010. That date was not met.

  The roots of Skywalker stretched back to the company's earliest years. Bigelow Aerospace was formed in 1999, and within the first few years the team was already sketching plans for assembling habitat modules into a manned facility in low Earth orbit, aimed at both funded research and space tourism. By 2004, those sketches had become public enough that Bigelow was describing this facility in those terms. The jump from 2004 ambition to 2005 concept was swift. The jump from 2005 concept to functional hardware would take far longer.

• 3. The Transport Problem

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  John M. Logsdon, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, put the central challenge clearly in 2005. "I have little doubt that the basic technology is likely to work," he said. "The issue is whether there's a transportation system that can get people, things, or both, up there." That warning proved prophetic. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, Bigelow was forced to compete with NASA for seats on the Russian Soyuz rocket, a situation the company described as "a distinctly untenable position."

  By 2008, Bigelow was in talks with Lockheed Martin about contracting launch services on the Atlas V-401 vehicle. By mid-2010, the company was pursuing two parallel paths: Boeing's CST-100 capsule on a ULA Atlas V launcher, and SpaceX's Dragon capsule on the Falcon 9. In May 2012, almost simultaneously with SpaceX's Dragon completing a successful mission to the International Space Station, Bigelow and SpaceX jointly announced they were teaming to offer private crewed missions to space.

  The math of launches was significant. With the initial Space Complex Alpha, Bigelow calculated it would need six flights a year. If a second, larger station were added, that number would grow to 24 flights per year. In 2014, plans called for a round-trip seat price to the station on a SpaceX Dragon V2, with the B330 modules themselves planned to launch on a Falcon Heavy. By April 2016, Bigelow had signed a separate agreement with United Launch Alliance to launch the first B330 on an Atlas V in 2020.

• 4. Space Complex Alpha

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  Bigelow announced the Next-Generation Commercial Space Station in mid-2010. In October of that year, the company gave its first planned configuration a name: Space Complex Alpha. The initial design called for two Sundancer modules and one B330 module. The seven-step orbital assembly sequence was detailed publicly. Step one was an unoccupied Sundancer module. Step two brought a commercial crew capsule with Bigelow astronauts to set up that first module and carry supplies. Step three added a supplemental power bus and docking node. Step four added the second Sundancer. Step five brought a second crew capsule for additional crew and a redundant return path to Earth. Step six added the B330, with its pressurized volume of 330 cubic meters. Step seven delivered a third crew capsule for a double-redundant re-entry option.

  In early 2013, Bigelow quietly revised the Alpha configuration, dropping the two Sundancer modules and replacing the design with two B330 modules instead. That same month, the company announced it would sell naming rights to the dual-B330 Alpha complex for US$25 million per year. Access prices were set in 2014: US$26.25 million for a seat aboard a SpaceX Dragon, or US$36.75 million aboard a Boeing CST-100. Leasing one-third of a module, roughly 110 cubic meters of space, for two months was provisionally priced at US$25 million.

  By October 2010, Bigelow had signed memoranda of understanding with six sovereign nations to use the on-orbit facilities: the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Japan, and Sweden. A seventh country, the United Arab Emirates, signed on in February 2011.

• 5. Building on the Ground

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  While the orbital plans were being revised, Bigelow was building a production facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada. The 181,000 square-foot plant was designed to house three production lines for three distinct spacecraft. The company expected to hire approximately 1,200 new employees and planned to begin production there in early 2012. The build-out would double the existing floor space at Bigelow and shift the company's focus from research and development toward full-scale manufacturing.

  By October 2011, Reuters reported that Bigelow had reduced its 115-member workforce to 51, because of delays in the development of the space taxis needed to carry people to the planned outposts. The workforce cut was a direct consequence of the same transportation bottleneck that Logsdon had flagged six years earlier. In mid-2009, in the middle of that uncertain period, Bigelow had announced they were continuing to develop a variety of space habitat architectures, signaling that the company intended to stay in the field even as the timelines slipped.

• 6. BEAM: A Test in Orbit

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  By January 2013, Bigelow Aerospace was developing a smaller test article for NASA: the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, known as BEAM. NASA purchased the pressurized module for attachment to the International Space Station. The BEAM arrived at the ISS on the 10th of April 2016, was berthed to the station on the 16th of April, and was expanded and pressurized on the 28th of May 2016. The initial plan called for at least two years of testing.

  NASA used the test period to monitor BEAM's structural integrity, leak rate, radiation dosage, and temperature changes. The module performed well. In October 2017, NASA announced it would remain attached to the ISS until 2020, with options for two further one-year extensions. The module was also put to practical use, storing up to 130 cargo transfer bags to free up space elsewhere on the station. Its continued presence on the ISS, years beyond the original test window, was the closest the Bigelow program came to a sustained operational presence in orbit.

• 7. Future Configurations and Limits

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  In October 2017, Bigelow Aerospace and United Launch Alliance announced a plan to launch a B330 module on ULA's Vulcan launch vehicle and then boost it to low lunar orbit using two additional Vulcan ACES launches by the end of 2022, to serve as a lunar depot. Bigelow's own published design catalog stretched further still, describing configurations ranging from a Deep Space Complex of four B330 modules to a nine-module Advanced Medical Facility with 100,000 cubic feet of habitable space. A concept called Lunar Depot Ares, with three B330 modules, was designed to land directly on the moon and hold up to 18 astronauts. A physical model of the Lunar Depot Ares concept was built.

  In late 2010, Bigelow indicated the company would like to construct ten or more space stations, and that a substantial commercial market existed to support such growth. A second orbital station, Space Complex Bravo, was described in 2010 as scheduled to begin launches in 2016 and reach commercial operation in 2017, comprising four B330 modules. None of those milestones were reached. All flights ultimately went on hold when Bigelow Aerospace laid off all of its employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, suspending the program that had begun with a hotel developer's vision back in 1999.