This is NOT Your Father's Blow Up "Toy"!

[Tuckerfan]

It's a blow up spaceship!

It is well into the development of 25% and 45% scale inflatable flight test modules for a series of four privately funded unmanned orbital test flights during 2005-07. It has already developed substantial full- and reduced-scale inflatable ground test hardware.

THE ORBITAL demonstrations and ground test hardware are aimed toward the launch of a man-tended commercial "Nautilus" module between 2008 and 2010. The watermelon-shaped Nautilus would weigh 20-25 tons and, once inflated in orbit, measure 45 X 22 ft. with 330 cu. meters of volume. This is larger than the 25 X 27-ft. tractor-tire shaped TransHab and substantially bigger than any individual ISS module.

Certainly looks promising.

[Chip]

...It's a blow up spaceship!...

As a reference: Along somewhat similar lines in being space-bound and inflatable. :wink:

[Azerelus]

There was a blow up satellite that was used, forgive a mis-recall, I believe it was called Echo nothing more than a big metallic gas bag which was to be used for bouncing radio over the horizon. Worked too.

Echo had an very low pressure - nothing near enough for breathing.

Some scientists proposed (for nuclear and perhaps ion drives) a system of balloon which would hold water (ice) and as the ice would converted to water and used in fuel, the empty space would be used to house men in a sphere of ice held together in a balloon.

This is an old concept.

Az

[Tuckerfan]

There was a blow up satellite that was used, forgive a mis-recall, I believe it was called Echo nothing more than a big metallic gas bag which was to be used for bouncing radio over the horizon. Worked too.

Echo had an very low pressure - nothing near enough for breathing.

Some scientists proposed (for nuclear and perhaps ion drives) a system of balloon which would hold water (ice) and as the ice would converted to water and used in fuel, the empty space would be used to house men in a sphere of ice held together in a balloon.

This is an old concept.

Az

Echo, IIRC, was a balloon put into orbit for the express purpose of allowing radio signals to be bounced off of it (if I've gotten the name wrong, I know that the function is correct as I've heard recordings of a broadcast Eisenhower made using it).

[ToSeek]

Bigelow's Gamble

The Bigelow Aerospace project to privately develop inflatable Earth-orbit space modules is beginning to integrate diverse U.S. and European technologies into subscale and full-scale inflatable test modules and subsystems at the company's heavily guarded facilities here.

While much public attention is focused on the massive International Space Station (ISS), Bigelow has quietly become a mini-Skunk Works for the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC).

Ongoing technical assistance to Bigelow from JSC is focused on helping the company spawn development of orbiting commercial inflatable modules by the end of the decade, with the possibility of JSC later using the Bigelow technology for inflatable modules on the Moon or Mars.

Inflatables are attractive because they offer large volume with enormous launch weight savings.

Bigelow Aerospace is also increasing the stakes that low-cost non-government transportation can be available to send astronaut crews to its inflatable space modules in Earth orbit by 2010.

Company founder and millionaire Robert T. Bigelow told Aviation Week & Space Technology that he will announce as early as this week a new $50-million space launch contest called America's Space Prize.

[daver]

This is an old concept.

Az

It is an old concept (inflatable manned stations). Echo's not a particularly good example; yes, it was inflatable, but it was never intended to be manned, and wasn't intended to orbit for a particularly long period of time. I've seen proposals for manned inflatables from around the dawn of the space age (I suppose there were ones from before the dawn of the space age, but I haven't looked). Lawrence Livermore proposed some inflatable designs in the 80's--around the time of the cancellation of Space Station Freedom and the proposal of Space Station Fred.

[01101001]

Echo, IIRC, was a balloon put into orbit for the express purpose of allowing radio signals to be bounced off of it [...]

JPL QuickLook: Echo 1, 1A, 2

[Mellow]

Hi,

your link states Echo 2 was the first joint US/USSR space mission, I wasn't aware of that.

[01101001]

your link states Echo 2 was the first joint US/USSR space mission, I wasn't aware of that.

That caught my eye, too. I just found this section of The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

At the outset of 1964, a tangible result of the initial Dryden-Blagonravov discussions came when NASA launched the communications satellite Echo II. Two weeks before the launch, Blagonravov had notified Dryden that the Academy of Sciences would participate in the tracking and communications experiments with Echo II as agreed in the Geneva talks of May 1963.

It's got a nice picture of Echo II, too, in a preflight inflation test. It's big, but the picture is small.

Here are some BIG pictures of the big craft:

http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/IMAGES/LARGE...000-001896.jpg

http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/IMAGES/LARGE...002-000203.jpg

(GRIN, Great Images in NASA, is kinda cool.)

Edit: A reader just reported that those NASA GRIN images I linked to are now only accessible from NASA sites. Pity. They were cool. I'm asking the webmaster there if it is supposed to be off-limits to hoi polloi.

Edit: I just tried NASA GRIN again and it worked. Those Echo images above worked, too. I haven't heard a direct response to my email to the webmaster, but having it working again is a good-enough.

Echo, IIRC, was a balloon put into orbit for the express purpose of allowing radio signals to be bounced off of it [...]

JPL QuickLook: Echo 1, 1A, 2

I took a year off from my UG studies in 1960/1961 and taught physics labs at Robert College in Istanbul. On several occassions I was able to point out Echo 1(A) to students as well as villagers in the town of Golcuk 100 km west of Istanbul. Echo was easily seen and quite impressive. In those days folks in Turkey were pretty possitive towards the US and quite impressed by our ability to put things into orbit.