Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Robert Bigelow and His Expandable Space Habs

Episode Date: March 31, 2015

Bigelow Aerospace’s BEAM expandable/inflatable space module will be attached to the International Space Station later this year. Mat travels to the company’s headquarters for a conversation with founder and CEO Robert Bigelow.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Need a new space station? Pump it up! This week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Join me at the sprawling headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace for a bon voyage party and a conversation with Robert Bigelow, the pioneer of inflatable habitats for space, big ones. Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla continues her reporting on what she found at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. In a couple of minutes, she'll tell us about the dramatic climax of the MESSENGER mission.

The Mercury-orbiting spacecraft is returning amazing science and images as it spirals down toward its doom. Bruce Betts awaits with his What's Up preview of an early April total lunar eclipse. We'll begin with the briefest of hellos from Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy, checking in by mobile phone from a train. Bill, tell us why you are on the train headed to Washington, D.C. Yes, yes, yes, because the Planetary Society is sponsoring a workshop, and we've assembled the real deal people, not people, not to be critical of my fellow citizens, but not people who don't really know what's going on.

And we're going to really take into account the budget and how long it will take to sustain funding our real mission to Mars. It's very exciting. And we'll be doing it for two days. With results coming later in the year, listen, this connection is so poor that I think I'll let you go, but we'll look forward to getting a report next week. I think we may be talking to some people who took part in this discussion. I'll give you an earful, as you say.

Thank you, Bill. Talk to you soon. Thank you, Matt. Tomorrow. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society on the train, as he often is, headed down to Washington, D.C., and the so-called Humans Orbiting Mars workshop that begins tomorrow as we speak. Emily, 4,000 orbits, and now they're coming fast as MESSENGER nears the end. That's right. MESSENGER is getting lower and lower in its orbit as it inevitably gets closer to the planet. And at the end of April, it's going to crash into Mercury. But the science is really fantastic from such a low orbit, and the team was pretty excited about their results recently. Tell us about some of what they showed you at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Well, their low-altitude campaign started last June, and that's where they bring the periapsis, or the closest approach of the spacecraft, as close as 25 kilometers away from the surface of Mercury. And from that altitude, they can see really high-resolution details on the surface. And, you know, it's not always true that when you get closer to a planet and get high resolution, the images get better. There are places on Mars

where high rise is getting diminishing returns. But everything I've ever seen from Messenger shows you that the more detail you get, the more interesting features you find. And one of my favorite images that they showed was this one of the rim of a volcanic vent. And the vent has blasted through the crust. And you can see layering in the crust. It's probably different volcanic ash layers and other similar materials. And they're cascading down the walls of this crater, just in fine fluted detail. You can see the gullies formed. It's just absolutely stunning. All right. Now, the one that got to me is this mysterious dark material

that's on the floor of not just one crater, but apparently several. What do we know about this? Yeah, you know, this is one of the most satisfying results, I think, of the Messenger mission, because it was this mystery, or at least this interesting observation from Earth that we made with the Arecibo giant radio dish pointed at Mercury and found this high reflectance material inside, or at least at Mercury's poles. And it was located mostly at the poles. And so they figured, well, maybe there are craters there that are permanently shadowed. And could there be ice at the poles of Mercury? It was suggestive, but there was no result. And then Messenger flew over the poles and actually used its little laser to bounce off this material that was permanently shadowed because Messenger couldn't see it. It was dark and found that lo and behold, this material was darker than the rest of Mercury, which didn't make any sense at all until they realized that what was going on is that we're seeing not just ice has moved to the poles of Mercury, but also other volatile materials, materials that don't stay solid at the hot temperatures closer to the equator on Mercury, and that includes organic

materials. So there's this carbon-rich material that's mantling ice deposits at the poles of Mercury. And finally, with this low-altitude campaign, they've managed to get the exposure settings on the camera just right, where they are using light that has reflected off of crater walls to illuminate permanently shadowed regions in the dark and see the floors of these craters and see the sharp lines that mark the edges of the deposits of the dark material that coincide perfectly with where it would be stable over the course of Mercury's year around the sun. It's just a beautiful combination of observation, physics, modeling, mathematics, and coming back again with observation to tie up this result in a nice tidy package. It's just beautiful. And fascinating. And it's all there for you to see

in Emily's March 26 blog entry at planetary.org about MESSENGER, nearly at the end of this marvelous mission. Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, that's Emily Lakdawalla. It seems so logical, so right, once you get past the myths. Why send full-sized reinforced aluminum cans into space when you can use the same launch volume to boost a structure that will expand by a factor of three? That is the dream Bigelow Aerospace has been pursuing for years. When the company announced a media event

at its North Las Vegas headquarters, I started making travel plans. On display would be the Bigelow Aerospace Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM. When it is delivered by a Dragon cargo capsule later this year, the beam will become the first structure of its kind to be attached to the International Space Station, and the first expandable structure to welcome humans in space. Weighing just 1,260 kilograms, or 3,000 pounds, the inflated beam's interior volume will be about that of a large camping tent, interior volume will be about that of a large camping tent, 16 cubic meters or 565 cubic feet. But Beam is dwarfed by what Bigelow is preparing for 2017. The B-330 gets its name from its gigantic volume, 330 cubic meters. If you've seen pictures of the interior of the old Skylab station, you

know what I'm talking about. Here's Bigelow Aerospace founder and CEO Robert Bigelow. You want to optimize the amount of volume per launch, theoretically, right? The standard module on the ISS is about 100, 110 cubic meters. That would consume a launch. For that same launch vehicle, presumably, maybe the fairing has to be slightly longer, but we would produce 330 cubic meters. So you get three times the volume for the cost of that rocket. Inflatable or expandable space structures have a long history,

beginning with the Echo communication satellites of the early 1960s. NASA is testing inflatable heat shields that could get humans to the Martian surface. And it was NASA, according to Robert Bigelow, that began exploring expandable habitats for humans. It was called the TransHab program. And at that time, the ISS was also a major entree on NASA's plate. And Congress decided to cause a singular focus, more less on the ISS is the story I've heard. And they cut the funding for the TransHab. I thought it was a phenomenal idea and I was excited to be able to try to pick up

where NASA left off. And that's essentially the story. So this has a NASA heritage behind it. We have already had two launches of Pathfinder spacecraft called Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 in 06 and 07. And that was so we could validate a number of things, including seals and around windows and bulkheads and so forth. That gave us an insight as to whether we were on the right track in the soft goods architecture. We were ecstatic that we had both of those be tremendous successes. We had actually booked more launches, and we decided after the second Genesis II launch that we ought to move on to larger systems. That was the beginning of things for us.

Also at the March 12 Bigelow Aerospace event was William Gerstenmaier, NASA's Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations. He joined Robert Bigelow at the podium. We see this hardware as a pretty important piece of equipment for us on board Space Station. Space Station is a great test bed. We use Space Station to test concepts for hardware that we may want to use when we go for long duration missions out to Mars and other locations. This expandable technology that we'll get a chance to test on station will play a really key role I believe in exploration but we'll get a chance to test it first on space station and see if the thermal properties are the way we think they should be, understand

if the acoustics properties are okay, look at the radiation properties, look at the micrometeoroid debris penetration properties of the module. So we'll get a chance to physically test out the module. We'll also allow crews to go inside, see what it's like to be in the larger volume without the typical racks that they have in other modules. So they'll get a chance to experience it kind of from a human standpoint. So this will be a great demonstration for us on Space Station in terms of technology that will help us move forward. And Station is a great testbed for that technology. Most of the time at the media briefing was given over to Q&A from a diverse group of reporters. I got a couple of questions in. I've talked to a lot of people who have

misunderstandings about the durability and the ability of an inflatable structure in space to deal with radiation impacts and so on. Could you talk about that a little bit? Of course. The expandable system is similar to maybe the steel belt architecture in your tires of your car. So we're familiar very much with tires for the last 150 years, perhaps, or 25 years. And we know that those are very robust systems. The architecture that we have and the kinds of materials that we use are quite similar in that robust defense against any kind of insults to the structure.

For example, space debris. We've contracted for many hypervelocity impact tests and the achievements are much better than aluminum structures are. In some cases we will defend better against an equivalent hull of the ISS and there won't be a penetration on our targets. In other cases at very high additional speeds and mass there could be a penetration but in the targets of comparison the damage is far worse on aluminum hull structures one test that we did there was a rent from bulkhead to bulkhead on there would theoretically there could have been on the test article that we use it was aluminum

simulation of a hull so these systems are very well able to defend against quite a serious impact, and the behavior is different than other kinds of expandable systems. There's no relationship to a balloon kind of reaction whatsoever, and we have omitted some of the restraint structure to test that very fact out. And it's a very well, it's more of an organized, very long duration period of time in which if a penetration did occur, the crew has a tremendous amount of time to provide a patch for that. So these systems are extremely reliable, the safest thing that mankind could be in today by far. And this includes radiation because there's no secondary propagation of protons and ions

through this kind of structure that reacts with aluminum. We have a minimal amount of aluminum in this structure, so they're very adept to deep space use beyond the magnetosphere of Earth. That's a significant advantage as well. And there are ways to, because of the enormous volume, we intend to use water tiles to further enhance the radiation protection. We also have a propulsion system that we use water for, and so that's a replenishable system that we can use as well.

The B-330 module awaits the arrival of what Robert Bigelow calls space taxis, the commercial crew transportation systems that are being developed by SpaceX, Boeing, and others. Towering over Bigelow and the rest of us was the mock-up for a module that will have to wait for a much bigger rocket. Codename? Olympus. Can you tell us about this big station behind us here, Olympus? This is a future concept, at least a generation beyond the B-330, and it actually requires a super heavy lifter. The volume of that is 2,250 cubic meters, which is twice that of the ISS. When we return, we'll talk one-on-one with Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace.

This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck.

Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV's So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV's not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV, then, Merck? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV.

Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety.

You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. On March 2nd, I was in the Las Vegas headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace, in part to see something called the Bigelow Aerospace Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, the expandable space habitat that will soon be attached to the International Space Station. After the media briefing, we were allowed to enter a clean room, where the BEAM was packed up like a giant birthday present,

ready to be loaded onto the Dragon capsule that will carry it to the ISS. Integration engineer Mike Schenck was standing by to answer questions. What are the structures on top there, Those two things that they look almost like antennas. No, that's what the grappling hooks will hook on and move it around. The canid arm? Yes, and put it in place on the ISS. It's large. It's of course going to expand to something far larger, but it's still impressive that this is going to be carried up in that unpressurized portion of the Dragon. It seems to be such an efficient way to put large structures in orbit and send them elsewhere. Yeah, it's a great idea.

The idea has been around for a long time, but this is coming to fruition with our company and a lot of work and developments going into this vehicle. At the end of a long day, I sat down with Bigelow Aerospace founder and CEO Robert Bigelow. You've had a couple of things in space already, but it has to be especially exciting to know that this module, Beam, is actually going to be part of a space station. There are going to be people inside it. Yeah, this is exciting and it's very different for us because for several reasons. One, we had never had an opportunity like this

to work with NASA. And NASA is kind of the litmus test for quality. And so we feel a certain satisfaction that if we can pass muster with NASA, then we did achieve something that was a job well done. So that was important. It's also important that this spacecraft is being accepted to be attached to a $100-plus billion machine. That's important. That exhibits some kind of faith. As a stepping stone, I think this is important that NASA is able to extract certainly a substantial amount of data from this spacecraft's behavior and performance.

However, we also know that it's a minor amount of data compared to what could be extracted from our B-330. So we're looking forward to hopefully having an opportunity to supply NASA with B330s and be able to supply space agencies of foreign countries with the opportunity to use those at a significantly less cost metric than what they're experiencing now. And for a lot of countries, it's not a matter of money. It's a fact that they don't even get a chance to fly. A lot of people don't realize that there may be 50 or 60 countries in the world with space agencies, but very, very, very few of them can actually have an astronaut corps and tell those men and women that they can go into space.

And the reason is there's only one station, and that station only has 12 people a year, if they actually have the full complement of astronauts. And the commitment in the deal is that the Russians get six of those people, the Americans get another four, so the rest of the world is left with two. And that's for an entire year of occupancy and usually they go up for six month increments so you might have six people for six months and another six

for another six months and as you pointed out uh when you were up here with william gerstmeyer no taxi service at least not yet yeah in fact back 2005, we were certain that by 2010 there was going to be taxi service. Well, why is that? Well, because NASA is stopping the flights of the shuttle. So the shuttle stopped in 2010. So we figure, all right, that's, gee, five years away. It's got to happen. So here we are in 2015, and we're still talking to people and saying,

well, they're asking, how sure are you that taxi service is going to be here another two or three years? And we're saying, well, we're pretty sure that by some time in 2017, it's going to be available. But nevertheless, we're taking the gamble and the risk, the financial risk, of putting together two B-330s in 2017 that by the end of 2017, they will be ready to fly. And it could be that they're ready to fly to someplace where there's no way to get people back and forth if there isn't transportation. to someplace where there's no way to get people back and forth if there isn't transportation. So that risk is real. But I think it's less real than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So I'm an optimist.

And I think in 2018, we have a chance of being able to deploy those for various customers. You've been at this for a very, very long time. And I think you've probably had the dream even longer. I don't know how much we have in common, but from what I've heard, we do have this in common, that a lack of math skills didn't stop us from dreaming and dedicating ourselves to space. Does that sound accurate? Yes, it's perfectly accurate. I knew that in my case I wasn't going to be a mathematical whiz, I wasn't going to be a mathematical whiz. And so my plan was that I would try to find some way to make money where I could hire the people that were.

So my direction was into the only thing that I thought might be available, and that was the real estate world. So I became a developer and contractor and owner and operator of an apartment company, apartments. And so I've operated thousands and thousands of apartments. I've built in my career 15,000 apartments under my own license as an owner-operator. I've purchased about 8,000 from other folks. So that industry has made the money available that we spend today. And so there you are. You put it to good use. I tried. It's still a working process. Congratulations on this really outstanding achievement and best of luck with the mission. Thank you very much, Matt. Bigelow Aerospace founder and CEO Robert Bigelow. On Monday, March 30th, as I was preparing this episode, NASA announced new partners in what it calls the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships, or NextSTEP.

Seven companies will receive minor funding for development of advanced space habitats, and they include Bigelow Aerospace. Bruce Batts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society and joins us every week for What's Up, as he is doing right this instant. Good to talk to you once again. One thing I'm looking forward to, I might even get up early for it, is that lunar eclipse. Well, if you don't get up early or don't stay up late, you're not going to see it.

No. Yeah, total lunar eclipse on April 4th. And realize for those in the Americas and such, that's the night that starts on April 3rd, but it's in the morning hours of the 4th. Those on the other side of the international date line watching from the western Pacific, where it's also visible, that will be your evening of April 4th. Pretty well visible from all of those areas. Everything surrounding the Pacific, it gets a little dicey towards the eastern coast of North America, the eastern U.S. They don't see the totality, but can catch the partial part unless you're in the

far northeastern U.S. or Canada, in which case, well, you're bumming. But there's another eclipse in a few months. Interesting thing about this eclipse, it is incredibly short totality The moon is just passing through the edge of the shadow of the earth And so it's total for about five minutes Centered around greatest eclipse, which is about 5 a.m. Pacific time, noon, UT You've got about three and a half hours where things are in partial eclipse But only five minutes of totality. So much for thinking that I could sleep in a little bit.

Well, it depends on whether you want to see totality or partial or just check out pictures in the morning. Totally, dude. Totally, dude. You also got planets, Venus low in the west after sunset looking super bright. Jupiter gradually moving over the coming weeks and months towards Venus in the sky, now high overhead in the south. Saturn coming up in the east later in the evening. On to this week in space history.

In 1966, Luna 10 became the first lunar orbiter. On to... I don't know what to make Space Fact. I don't know what to make of that. That's my goal, is to confuse you. The Earth and the Sun, they're really far apart. But the Sun is really, really big. You could fit about 107 suns between the Earth and the Sun.

That's great. I've never heard that one before. I made it up myself. Nicely done. I used real numbers and everything. We have some great real numbers coming up, too, as part of the trivia question. Go ahead. Take us into that.

Let's get to those. I asked you, what is the closest known white dwarf, stellar remnant white dwarf? How'd we do, Matt? Lots and lots of responses. Another record, perhaps because of the prize, that additional copy of Jim Bell's great book, The Interstellar Age, Inside the 40-Year Voyager Mission. And I do think it's going to be signed by Jim. The publisher sent him one, and he's going to send it on to us.

Jim, the publisher sent him one, and he's going to send it on to us. Paul Edelstein, Paul Edelstein of Toronto, Ontario, where we had a blast, a big party not too long ago, last fall, Planetary Radio Live. Paul says it is, and always will be, maybe not always, Sirius B, Sirius B that's about 8.6 light years from yours truly from all of us here on earth indeed cool all right well Paul congratulations we will put that book in the mail to you as soon as we get it

I did not surprisingly get a bunch of other interesting notes from folks about this one Daryl Gardner, Stephen Coulter a couple of other people they mentioned that Sirius B is also known as, after all, it is the companion of the dog star Sirius. Sirius B is known as the pup. The pup. Maybe my new favorite star.

Here's something from T.J. Grzykowiak in Adrian, Michigan. He's one of those guys I was telling you did some math. He says if he got it right, Sirius B is something like 50.5 trillion miles away. So traveling at 70 miles per hour, the highway speed limit in Michigan, you'd get there in approximately, approximately now, 82,446,477 years. Road trip. So how many suns is that between here and there? Work on that before next week.

I love this one from Paul Code in Los Altos, California. Did you know, Bruce, that on Sirius B, they are just now enjoying the first season of The Big Bang Theory? I did not know that. All right. Big Bang Theory. I did not know that. All right, here's one that you're going to like, I think, because of your comparisons talking about white dwarf material. Comes to us from Luke Rasporsak in Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, down under. He says that a can of white dwarf weighs about 1.2 million tons, or as much as 300,000 elephants, the total number in all of southern Africa. So a can of white dwarf. I like to buy it fresh myself.

It's so pricey, though. We've got to fit this in. It's a haiku from John Holmgren. Here you go. Behind white-blue light, serious relationship. His companion hides. Oh, poetry. Thank you, John. Thank you, everybody. We had so many great entries. I wish we could put all the really good ones on the air, but there just isn't time.

But there is time for this next contest. Something that should be quite simple for a subset of our Southern Hemisphere listeners. What constellation appears on the flags of Australia and New Zealand? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get your entry in. Yeah, do that by Tuesday, the 7th of April at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And there'll be a Planetary Radio t-shirt in it for you if you're the one picked by Random.org.

All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about beach balls. Thank you and good night. Beach balls, they have to be inflated, just like what we were talking about in the main segment today with Robert Bigelow. Although I think his are considerably more durable. That was Bruce Betts.

He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the expanding, in a good way, members of the Society. Daniel Gunn is our Associate Producer. Josh Doyle created our theme music.

I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.