Private Space Firm Blows up Space Station Module—and That’s a Good Thing

Private area firm Sierra Space introduced yesterday that it efficiently accomplished a stress check final month on an in-development astronaut habitat—a check that concerned the pumping of gasoline into the inflatable module till it blew aside. This is the second profitable check, following one earlier this 12 months in July.

Sierra Space has been growing the Large Integrated Flexible Environment, or LIFE, habitat to proceed its foray into long-term business spaceflight. The firm says that the LIFE habitat is a three-story platform designed for each low Earth orbit and long-duration missions that may home habitation and science efforts. The firm, together with Blue Origin, is searching for to position a non-public area station, known as Orbital Reef, into Earth orbit, onto which the LIFE modules could be hooked up.

To check the power of the LIFE habitat in area, Sierra Space carried out a profitable Ultimate Burst Pressure (UBP) check. The crew took a one-third scale model of the habitat and pumped it filled with hydrogen gasoline till the purpose of failure—explosion—to find out its stress limits. Given how violent the explosion threatened to be, the Sierra Space crew carried out the check on the identical launch pad that NASA used to check rockets throughout the Apollo program. This is the second UBP stress check of LIFE, following one in July. Both have confirmed profitable.

“This second successful UBP test proves we can demonstrate design, manufacturing and assembly repeatability, all of which are key areas for certification,” stated LIFE chief engineer Shawn Buckley in a company press release. Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice additionally stated: “The LIFE habitat module is essential technology for enabling humans to safely and comfortably begin to develop new civilizations in space.”

The LIFE module is a big, spherical habitat made out of woven material, primarily consisting of Vectran, which is an artificial fiber made out of a liquid crystal polymer. Vectran is often utilized in spaceflight application, together with the airbags that helped land the Pathfinder on Mars in 1997. This second check was carried out at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and the primary was carried out at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Sierra Space says that this most up-to-date check noticed LIFE withstanding pressures of 204 psi, exceeding the protection threshold of 182.4 psi.

Theoretically, the LIFE habitat will launch on a standard rocket and can then be inflated whereas in orbit, offering astronauts with a spherical habitat that’s 27 ft (8.2 meters) in diameter to reside and work in. Sierra Space says it’ll conduct a full scale UBP exams of the LIFE habitat in 2023 to finish NASA’s certification.

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