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"  NASA tried making inflatable space habitats during the 1990s with its TransHab program, but ultimately gave up on it. What makes you think Bigelow can succeed where NASA failed? NASA started down the path but they just never spent the money to develop it. They abandoned it based almost purely on politics.  They had started going in that direction because they think that outside of low Earth orbit metallic structures arent really viable. As a high-energy particle hits something metallic, it spalls out the other end. So you get lower energy radiation, but a lot more of it. You can think of it like a bullet hitting a glass windshield. If you dont get hurt by the initial bullet, it sprays little pieces of glass everywhere, and that can be just as dangerous.  So NASA started down this path of nonmetallic pressure vessels. Theyve been looking at soft [materials] since the 50s, and they started pursuing it pretty hard in the mid-90s. That [research] program was fairly focused on a Mars mission. Then politics got in the way, and Congress decided that anything Mars had to go. The technology had gotten wrapped up in being associated with Mars, rather than being a technology that we should pursue for other reasons.  [With us,] Mr. Bigelow started the company, licensed some of NASAs patents, and now NASA is coming back to it with the BEAM program. And were well ahead of where they left off. How have you tested the technology so far? With the soft [materials] being different from metallic structures, weve done a ton of testing to make sure the structure itself is capable of holding those pressures. Weve done everything from loading them at a normal level for a long period of time, to exposing them to a much higher loading than we ever would see on a normal vehicle for short periods of time, all the way to pressurizing the things until they burst to find out what their ultimate strength can be. Weve done a ton of orbital-debris testing, where weve taken the biggest guns we could find and shot particles at them.  And thats just for the structure. Weve done a lot of stuff with life-support equipment. Weve got a full BA330 vehicle with functional life-support hardware that weve had people in for hours or days at a time, and they give off humidity and CO2 and stink and everything else. We clean that all out of the atmosphere and add oxygen back in, and monitor the atmosphere, and make sure that its a livable environment. Your test modules, Genesis I and Genesis II, have been operating as unmanned space stations in orbit for several years now. How have you modified your design for the full-scale version, the BA330, based on your results? Weve made it a little bit more robust. We were looking for leak rates and assuring ourselves that we were going to lose a lot of atmosphere and would have to replenish it. Actually, it turned out way better than we expected. The Genesis missions were amazingly successful. Weve had ground versions of similarly sized vehicles, and the ones in space actually worked better than the ones we had on the ground, which surprised the heck out of us.  We ended up designing ourselves a lot more back doors so that we could fix software problems from afar, because you cant really protect everything from going wrong, but you can create fail-safes and back doors to fix those things when they do go wrong. Radiation affects transistors in a certain way that it can flip bits one way or the other, and if you have ways of going back through and fixing those things, you can solve 99 percent of your problems that it causes. What are the next steps to get this off the ground? Weve got to finalize the design itself. We need to do a lot more environmental testing to make sure it survives the launch environment. Were going to put it through temperature and pressure cyclesit goes through a pretty heavy vibration shock on the way up. Will we ever be able to camp out on Mars using an inflatable habitat? Wed like to see that at some point. I think a much more near-term plan is to go back to the moon. Right now, in low Earth orbit were 250 miles off the surface of Earth at any point in time. We can get back pretty fast. The moon is a few days or weeks away. Mars is months or years away. So we want to get used to being farther and farther out, and get more and more self-sufficient from a vehicle perspective and from a crew-health perspective. If you have a medical emergency in LEOlike a burst appendixyou can get them back home to a hospital in probably four hours. From the moon, thats probably something theyre going to have to address in orbit, because theyre not going to have four or five days to get someone with a burst appendix back to Earth to get fixed. We want to get some practice in before we head to Mars. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a10625/how-soon-can-we-check-in-to-a-space-hotel-16798533/>