Shaped like a fat sausage, the 14-foot-long vehicle is the first step
toward what its sponsor, Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas, Nev., hopes will
be a space habitat that can be used for anything from producing high-quality
pharmaceuticals to housing "space tourists" of the future.
William Schneider
(College Station)—Engineering professor William Schneider is busy these days in his classroom at Texas A&M University, but his mind sometimes wanders to a place about 300 miles straight up.
That's where a new kind of spacecraft he designed and helped build floats in orbit not far from the International Space Station. Shaped like a fat sausage, the 14-foot-long vehicle is the first step toward what its sponsor, Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas, Nev., hopes will be a space habitat that can be used for anything from producing high-quality pharmaceuticals to housing "space tourists" of the future.
Schneider designed the inflatable spacecraft (then known as TransHab) in 1997, while he was a senior engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. TransHab was one of several designs being developed for use during exploratory missions to Mars, but the project was cancelled in 2000, shortly after Schneider retired from NASA and joined the Texas A&M engineering faculty.
Bigelow Aerospace, established by Robert Bigelow, founder and CEO of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, bought the design from NASA after the space agency cancelled the project in 2000 and asked Schneider to be chief engineer for the project, now called Genesis, as it was developed. Schneider agreed and spends part of his time working with Bigelow engineers at the company's Las Vegas headquarters.
Genesis 1 lifted into orbit this summer atop a Russian Dnepr rocket launched from the Kosmotras space complex in the Orenburg region of Russia. It's unlike any previous orbital vehicles, Schneider said.
"It was fantastic," Schneider said. "Seeing this concept become reality was very gratifying."
The inflatable orbiter, 14 feet long and about 8 feet in diameter, rode the Russian rocket furled like an umbrella around a central spine and inside an aerodynamic shroud to protect it during the launch. When it reached orbit, the protective shroud was discarded and the orbiter inflated to its full size. Its 6-inch-thick skin is a sandwich of Kevlar, graphite cloth and collapsible foam, reinforced by a basket-like mesh of Kevlar straps.
Tests before launch showed that the graphite cloth-and-foam sandwich resists damage from micrometeorites and orbiting junk much better than the rigid skins of more conventional spacecraft. It's strong—able to hold a pressure equivalent to four times the atmospheric pressure on earth.
The next step will be to launch a Genesis 2 spacecraft, then later a half-scale version, and—in 2010—a full-sized orbiter—about 42 feet long and 24 feet in diameter.
Schneider's "space-dreaming" is ending up as a bonus for his students—he is able to work examples of what's involved in developing a project like Genesis into his coursework.
"It gives them a picture of both the realities and the promise of engineering," he
said. 