Travel experiences: Inflatable Space Hotels and Farms Could Soon Become a Reality

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Space missions could soon carry giant inflatables as additional accommodation units, ready to be installed in orbit.

Inflatable space hotels and farms could soon become a reality as part of travel experiences

Space startup Max Space is developing "high-quality, high-volume" expandable "space habitats" to solve the fundamental problem humans face when crossing space frontiers - the lack of habitable space.

Funded by a number of private investors, the founders of this travel experience start-up are two veteran entrepreneurs who boast more than 40 years of work in the space industry, including 25 years of similar projects with NASA. The units they worked on are "well packed" for transport and inflate to become rigid, high-spec habitats once they reach low Earth orbit.

The company has already developed a 20 m3 version, which is slated for launch via a SpaceX rideshare in 2026, and plans to create 100 m3 and 1000 m3 spaces by 2030. Being light and small in transit, they solve one of the bigger challenges for those building space stations and the like: the cost of simply transporting the infrastructure into space. For reference, Max Space notes that it took more than 60 launches at a cost of more than $100 billion to get the 1,000m3 International Space Station up and running. Max Space claims it can put the same volume of habitable or storage space into orbit with a single flight of the Space X Falcon 9, with a "100-fold improvement in cost per cubic meter"

Another unique selling point of space inflatables is their scalability, which, according to the company, could enable volumes of 10,000 m3 or "stadium" sized habitats, and which will require the new Starship or New Glenn to be online to be transported. The range of uses suggested by Max Space is apparently as vast as the structures themselves. From entertainment and hospitality spaces, to agriculture, laboratories or pharmaceutical production, or logistics and warehousing, to name just a few, Max Space says their modules "will enable people to live and work in space in ways that have never been possible before. have been possible until now".

The idea of ​​an inflatable aircraft withstanding the forces and potential impacts of space debris is extraordinary, but their strength is due to the use of isotensoid architecture, where the structural fibers can adapt to the ideal geometry to support a maximum load. They also have a ballistic shield based on multilayer fibers, which the manufacturers say in a press release is "stronger than titanium or aluminum."