LOUISVILLE, Colo. — As the nation celebrated a “small step for (a) man,” a leading aerospace company took a giant leap in space technology.
Sierra Space, a commercial space-tech company, said its expandable space station technology passed a seventh key validation test, and second full-scale structural test, at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
The company said results herald a giant leap toward building the world’s first end-to-end business and technology platform in Low Earth Orbit, enabling humanity to find the answers to some of the toughest problems faced on Earth.
Completion of last month’s Ultimate Burst Pressure test, in collaboration with ILC Dover (an Ingersoll Rand Business) and NASA, accelerates Sierra Space’s revolutionary softgoods technology towards on-orbit operations, the company said.
Planned for an initial stand-alone pathfinder mission before the end of the decade, the technology will also feature as a key element of the Orbital Reef commercial space station. The test will close out Milestone 8 for Orbital Reef with Blue Origin under NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program.
“We are 100 percent committed to maintaining U.S. leadership in Low Earth Orbit,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice. “Sierra Space is leading the way with the first commercial space station to replace the International Space Station when it is decommissioned and ensure there is no gap in LEO. Our revolutionary, expandable space station technology reinvents the space station.
“Our technology, for the first time, will enable the right unit economics that will usher in the full commercialization of space. Our biotech and industrial partners will utilize our factories of the future to innovate new products that will massively disrupt terrestrial markets and benefit life on Earth.”
Sierra Space is gearing up for a first test of its 500 cubic-meter space station technology next year.
“No other company is moving at the speed of Sierra Space to develop actual hardware, stress-tested at full scale, and demonstrate repeatability. We’ve taken a softgoods system that very few companies around the world have been able to design, and now we have consistent, back-to-back results,” said Shawn Buckley, vice president of Earthspace Systems, Space Stations, at Sierra Space. “A second successful full-scale test is an absolute game changer. We now know it’s possible to equal or surpass the total habitable volume of the entire International Space Station, in a single launch.”
The first product is a three-story structure that is 27 feet in diameter. It can comfortably sleep four astronauts, with additional room for science experiments, exercise equipment, a medical center and a garden system, which can grow fresh produce for astronauts on long-duration space missions.
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