Inflatable astronauts’ room fails to expand
Print Edition
NASA hit a snag while releasing air into an experimental inflatable room at the International Space Station yesterday and everything was put on hold for at least a day.
Mission Control ordered astronaut Jeffrey Williams to call it quits after the operation had dragged on for more than two hours, with the compartment expanding by just a few inches. The inflation process could resume today, depending on what engineers learn.
“Thanks for all your patience today, and we’ll hope for better luck tomorrow,” Mission Control radioed.
“That’s space business,” Williams replied.
It was supposed to take barely an hour for the commercial test chamber known as BEAM — the world’s first inflatable room for astronauts — to swell four times in volume.
Everything went smoothly at first as Williams opened a valve, allowing air to flow into BEAM, short for Bigelow Expandable Activity Module. He did that four more times before Mission Control told him to stop because the room had barely inflated.
After a lengthy pause and another try, NASA called the whole thing off and engineers huddled at Johnson Space Center in Houston to try to figure out why BEAM hadn’t expanded properly.
Bigelow Aerospace hopes to launch even bigger inflatable habitats in the future for use by tourists orbiting Earth, as well as professional astronauts who are bound for Mars.
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