North Las Vegas-made space habitat to launch into orbit Friday

Officials from a North Las Vegas aerospace company will gather at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida today to witness what they hope will be a giant leap for their inflatable space habitat.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is set to blast into orbit on board an unmanned SpaceX rocket at 1:43 p.m. local time today.

If all follows plan, the module will be attached to the International Space Station and inflated, creating a new room about the size of a one-car garage that will remain in place for the next two years to test the design’s durability and functionality.

Company founder Robert Bigelow, who is in Florida to watch the launch with 15 of his employees, said the trial run in low Earth orbit is crucial for developing flexible habitats that could one day carry human travelers back to the moon and on to Mars or beyond.

“This is an important step for us,” he said. “These are the habitat and transportation vessels of the future.”

NASA developed the concept of inflatable space environments, and Bigelow built and tested models at its 350,000-square-foot facility on 50 acres near Martin Luther King Boulevard and Cheyenne Avenue.

Bigelow said the BEAM is made from a variety of materials and reinforced like a steel-belted tire to shield the people inside from heat, radiation, tiny meteoroids and other debris.

The module was originally scheduled to go up in early September. But the mission was pushed back after another of Elon Musk’s unmanned SpaceX resupply rockets destined for the space station exploded less than three minutes after liftoff on June 28.

The delay has offered one more learning opportunity for the BEAM team: Bigelow said the group never expected its module to spend this much time squished down and packed away for shipment, so it is eager to see how it performs.

In its compressed form, Bigelow said, BEAM resembles a three-layer cake with white frosting — albeit one 8 feet in diameter and weighing 3,000 pounds.

Once SpaceX’s Dragon resupply capsule reaches its destination, the space station’s robotic arm will grab the module and attach it to one of the station’s portals.

The module can be inflated in as few as 4 minutes, but Bigelow said NASA plans to expand BEAM slowly over a few hours and then spend several days testing the conditions inside it to make sure it’s safe.

“Then they’ll open the hatch” and someone will venture in, Bigelow said. “I think that’s going to be a lot of fun for whoever gets to do that.”

Though BEAM has a self-inflating system, it will be filled in this case with pressurized air from the space station.

The expanded module is shaped like an egg with flat ends. It is smaller than the space station’s existing modules, but roomy enough for two people to work comfortably without needing space suits or helmets, Bigelow said. “They’ll be in a short-sleeve environment.”

Assuming BEAM works as advertised, Bigelow hopes to follow it up with the B330, a cylinder-shaped module 45 feet long and 22 feet in diameter with 20 times the interior space of its little brother.

“We can do that in 2020. We can have two of them ready to launch in 2020,” said Bigelow, who owns the Budget Suites of America hotel chain and founded his aerospace company in 1999.

Then there is Olympus. At almost 80,000 cubic feet, the company’s biggest prototype is more than twice the size of the International Space Station.

Bigelow said such expandable habitats could pave the way for a building boom in space, from orbiting industrial parks filled with commercial labs and small manufacturing facilities to docking stations above the moon or Mars where landing craft could be serviced and sent back down.

Right now, that future sits on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

Friday will mark the third — and arguably the most conventional — launch for Bigelow and his team.

In 2006 and 2007, the company tested Genesis I and Genesis II, two smaller versions of its inflatable systems that were launched into space in the nose cones of two repurposed Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Bigelow stayed in Las Vegas for the Genesis I launch but traveled to a Russian military base to watch Genesis II emerge from a silo and rocket into the sky.

Bigelow said he is sure he will be excited when the time comes for today’s launch. But on Tuesday, when he spoke to the Las Vegas Review-Journal before leaving for Florida, there were no butterflies in his stomach.

“I’m still waiting for that to happen,” he said.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find @RefriedBrean on Twitter.