LOUISVILLE, Colo. — As Sierra Space continues its inflatable technology, the company has expanded its partnership with the Marshall Space Flight Center to further accelerate the project’s development.
The program – LIFE (Large Integrated Flexible Environment) – is a full-scale habitat product line for missions to low-Earth orbit, the moon and deep space.
Sierra Space said the agreement with Marshall supports ongoing design and development of LIFE test articles. Also, a full-scale engineering mockup – the size of a three-story apartment building – will move to Marshall from the Kennedy Space Center.
“NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has a rich history in leading highly-complex testing for innovative systems and technologies,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice. “Under this new Space Act Agreement, we’re expanding our collaboration activities with Marshall, where we will be able to tap into that wealth of expertise, talent and facility capabilities at a much deeper level.”
Sierra Space, NASA and ILC Dover subject matter experts performed the recent ASC test inside a specially built, climate-controlled building at Marshall, adjacent to the flame trench of the Saturn 1/1B test stand — where NASA tested rockets for the Apollo program.
The location is optimum for softgoods inflatable destructive testing in performance and observation, Sierra Space said. ILC Dover is Sierra Space’s softgoods provider.
The inflatable module is a three-story commercial habitation, science and bio pharma platform designed to allow humans to live and work comfortably in low-Earth orbit and beyond. LIFE will serve as the habitation and payload element for the Orbital Reef commercial space station, a collaboration between Sierra Space and Blue Origin.
“Our testing campaign has demonstrated that our LIFE habitat pressure shell design has a predicted life of far greater than 60 years – or 525,600 hours – based on Sierra Space’s 15-year on-orbit life requirement and the applied 4x safety factor,” said Shawn Buckley, Sierra Space chief engineer for LIFE. “We are obviously simulating pressures well in excess of the norm.
“Test after (extreme) test, we continue to exceed our program requirements, validating that LIFE’s design, manufacturing, and assembly methods are consistent and repeatable.”
The next series of one-third-scale LIFE certification tests will focus on inserting hard structures into the pressure shell and correlating the results to previous tests. Sierra Space anticipates moving toward full-scale LIFE habitat tests this year.
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