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NASA Inflates BEAM

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 28, 2016
Filed under

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

11 responses to “NASA Inflates BEAM”

  1. Tritium3H says:
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    LOL, love the graphic, Keith!
    Congratulations Bigelow and NASA.

  2. Michael Spencer says:
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    You just can’t help yourself, can you Keith?

  3. Ben Russell-Gough says:
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    Who has priority for feeding hats to the self-proclaimed ‘expert pundits’ who claimed that the issues on Thursday proved that Bigelow couldn’t deliver?

  4. Steve Pemberton says:
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    I watched the inflation yesterday, or at least I had the TV on the whole time, as it took about seven hours. In the end it amounted to just over two minutes of valve opening, done a few seconds at a time. But still it was pretty interesting. They would have Jeff Williams open the valve for a few seconds, letting air flow from Tranquility into the module. The pressure would rise a little, then over the next several minutes the pressure would slowly fall as stitches broke and the module expanded. Sometimes Williams would leave his mike open so you could hear the pop sounds that occurred when stitches broke.

    They would wait for the pressure to stabilize before having him open the valve again. At one point they kept decreasing the valve opening time, eventually to just one second at a time. Even the one second valve openings would break a few stitches and cause some expansion, so they did one second increments for quite awhile. However as they got to within a few inches of full size, and also starting to go past the end of Williams’ work day, they decided to finish it and so the next several valve openings were increased, getting up to 10, 20 and even 30 seconds at a time, and also with less time between valve openings. When Williams opened the valve those lengths of time it sounded just like popcorn as the stitches broke with machine gun rapidity. There must have been hundreds of stitches overall. Would be nice to know more about how the stitching was done but I suppose that might be propriety information.

    After it was expanded to full size, it was still only at about 300 millibar if I remember correctly. Williams then initiated opening the pressurized air canisters inside the module to bring it up to standard pressure, which took just over ten minutes. Although they won’t open the hatch for another week or so.

  5. Jeff Havens says:
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    Has anyone seen an explanation as to why BEAM does not look “as advertised”? Rather than inflating like a balloon, it looks more like a blown-up Armadillo.

    Please note — I’m not asking in complaint; I’m genuinely curious as to whether the folds and flap protrusions we see are extra shielding, or if there is still some stretching that the module needs to do yet.

    • Wayne Martin says:
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      I’m glad someone said something and I think you hit it right on the head with “Armadillo” LOL 🙂

      How could the graphics be so different from the actual module?

      Unless there were more stitches popping than there should have been; )

      • Sharty McStoolpants says:
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        The answer is very straight forward. Animation for the Robotics planning are done a year before critical design review (CDR.) The whipple shield MMOD design progressed significantly in the intervening years.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I wonder if it was ever fully expanded in vacuum here on the planet? Doesn’t JPL have a chamber big enough? (It sure looked like it when I saw it, long time ago I admit at an Open House).

      • fcrary says:
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        JPL ought to have a vacuum chamber big enough. Wikipedia lists the BEAM module as 4 m long and 3.2 m in diameter (call it 14 by 11 ft). The big thermal vacuum chamber at JPL has fit ~6 m long, 4 m diameter spacecraft. I don’t know if JPL was involved but that chamber is sort of the high end of the available ones. There are a few that big around, so expanding BEAM on the ground would have been possible. But I doubt you could do a realistic deployment test. The forces and dynamics in gravity are pretty different and most ground tests of deployable systems aren’t all that informative.

  6. Wayne Martin says:
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    Absolutely hilarious Picture!

    Especially in the context of all the predicted inflation scenarios…

    Simply Perfect!