Nanoracks Announces The Starlab Private Space Station
Nanoracks, Voyager Space, and Lockheed Martin Teaming to Develop Commercial Space Station, Nanoracks
“Nanoracks, in collaboration with Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT], has formed a team to develop the first-ever free flying commercial space station. The space station, known as Starlab, will be a continuously crewed commercial platform, dedicated to conducting critical research, fostering industrial activity, and ensuring continued U.S. presence and leadership in low-Earth orbit. Starlab is expected to achieve initial operational capability by 2027.”
The main structure appears to be inflatable. Is Bigelow involved in this at all? I don’t find mention of them at the Nanoracks web site.
According to the news release, Lockheed Martin is responsible for the habitat.
Thanks, I see that now: “…a large inflatable habitat, designed and built by Lockheed Martin…”. It seems that Bigelow shuttered on the verge of the emergence of a market for their work. Perhaps LockMart has licensed or purchased their IP? https://news.lockheedmartin…
Interesting take.
When I first took a quick look at the video, before reading the release; my first thought was the same as yours…Bigelow. It will be interesting to see how Lockheed’s habitat work evolves.
Mine too.
I believe NASA released the TransHab patents to public domain ~2016.
Yup. With a number of years of experience with the tech and multiple inflatables in orbit, Bigelow could be several steps beyond the tech that NASA released on inflatables.
The story isn’t just Bigelow. Many of their soft structure bits were made by Thin Red Line Aerospace in Chilliwack BC, Canada.
http://www.thin-red-line.co…
I was unaware that Bigelow “shuttered”. I knew they were in mothballs waiting for things like Crew Dragon, but I hadn’t heard that they’d gone under.
With zero employees since March of 2020, it’s hard to see how they go forward from here. The claim was that they fired everyone due to the pandemic. Well, 98% of us have been back to work for a very long time now and Bigelow still has zero employees. The Nanoracks station would have been a perfect application of their tech and experience, yet they still have zero employees and LM is listed as the company building the inflatable hab. The wheels of private space station development are spinning right now. If Bigelow isn’t reanimated very soon, I would be surprised if they ever reappeared.
Bigelow Aerospace and their inflatable stations are joined at the hip to Boeing and CST-100…which still hasn’t flown (successfully).
That might be the real reason why they’re still stuck. Let’s not totally write them off until July 2022 or so.
More like hired their discarded employees.
I suspect several former Bigelow engineers are involved.
Build more and more of these. Sell them to other nations. Offer major tax credits for commercial operations (zero g commercial production – zero tax). Have the gov buy 1/2 the time and space on each station, then parse it out to US research. The more stations, the more crewed/cargo launches, the less expensive it will become over time. This can be the start of true commercial large scale operations.