Sierra House has accomplished a key take a look at of its inflatable house habitat, as the corporate progresses towards launching and working a personal house station with Blue Origin earlier than the top of the last decade.
The “final burst stress” take a look at of the inflatable module was performed at NASA’s Marshall House Flight Middle. Because the identify suggests, the aim of the take a look at is to inflate the unit till it bursts. On this occasion, engineers inflated the module to 77 psi earlier than it burst, proving that it exceeded NASA’s really useful security degree of 60.8 psi by 27%.
Whereas Sierra has performed a collection of burst checks on sub-scale items of the habitat, referred to as Giant Built-in Versatile Surroundings (LIFE), that is the primary on a full-scale module. At full scale, the module stands at over 20 ft tall and is round one-third the amount of the Worldwide House Station.
As Leanne Thompson, a methods engineer at Sierra, identified in a current video on the take a look at, it took NASA 10 to fifteen launches to ship up that very same quantity of liveable house with the ISS. Every LIFE module is designed to suit inside a typical five-meter payload fairing, although the corporate mentioned it’s engaged on greater iterations of 1,400 cubic meters (bigger than the ISS) that might slot in a seven-meter fairing.
The take a look at centered on the LIFE habitat’s stress shell or restraint layer, which is product of expandable “softgoods” that carry out like a inflexible construction as soon as they’re inflated. Softgoods as a supplies class have aerospace heritage: There have been inflatable airlocks hooked up to the ISS, and demonstration modules developed by Bigelow Aerospace have been launched to house within the 2000s.
The softgoods that make up the LIFE habitat embrace Vectran straps, that are made out of high-performance polymers and different supplies. In a press launch, Sierra mentioned that Vectran is “stronger than metal when inflated on-orbit.” The corporate is working with ILC Dover to design and take a look at the straps previous to this full-scale take a look at.
Though the burst take a look at is actually suggestive, it might be a mistake to match the LIFE module to a balloon. Within the video above, Sierra briefly shows 9 layers that can finally make up every module, together with the restraint layer, corresponding to thermal insulation and an outer cowl.
Sierra’s plan is to deploy the LIFE modules in low Earth orbit as a part of Orbital Reef, a personal house station the corporate is creating with Blue Origin. Notably, Sierra particularly references the challenge within the press launch, which may very well be at the very least partly a response to reporting from CNBC final yr that the Orbital Reef challenge was on the verge of falling aside.
Sierra mentioned this yr will probably be considered one of “aggressive” testing at each sub- and full-scale of the opposite layers of the habitat.
