Bigelow Aerospace Soars with Private Space Station Deals

A private space company offering room on inflatable space habitats for research has found a robust international market, with eager clients signing up from space agencies, government departments and research groups.

Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, chief of Bigelow Aerospace, has been busy marketing his private space modules, an outreach effort leading to six deals being signed with clients this year.

The deals, in the form of memorandums of understanding, involve Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Australia and the United Kingdom. 

Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999, headquartered in Las Vegas, drawing upon his construction, real estate, and hotel savvy to forge the use of expandable space structures. To date, he has spent more than $200 million to hammer out his business plan for space.

Some of that private cash was spent to hurl two of his firm's prototype expandable space modules into orbit. The company's Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 test modules, lofted in July 2006 and in June 2007, served as forerunners to ever-larger and human-rated space structures.

More recently, some $20 million of Bigelow's cash has flowed into a sprawling, 185,000 square-foot expansion to his North Las Vegas facilities, a building that enables the churning out of bigger space habitats. Space.com