Update 31 May: The BEAM habitat was successfully inflated on the second try, on Saturday, 28 May.
Original article, published 27 May
With balloons and space habitats alike, sometimes you have to take a deep breath and try again. After a failed attempt to inflate a blow-up new room on the International Space Station, NASA is considering next steps.
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, was installed on the space station on 16 April and was supposed to be inflated on Thursday. But like a stubborn air mattress that stays flat, folds in the soft fabric kept it from expanding even as astronaut Jeff Williams tried to pump in air.
In a 27 May teleconference, representatives from NASA and Bigelow Aerospace discussed what went wrong.
“We went through a sequence, stepping up the pressure,” said NASA’s Jason Crusan. After some initial growth, the habitat stopped expanding even as pressure built up. “We ran into higher forces than our models predicted,” he said.
Concerned, the team stopped inflating the BEAM and let it sit overnight, where it grew a little more – but not enough. Their current plan is to let it completely depressurize, and try again in the morning of Saturday, 28 May.
If the second attempt fails, a third try will have to be postponed until Thursday, 2 June, since the ISS astronauts have plans to conduct other experiments with the station’s robot arm starting next week.
While those experiments are going on, the BEAM will have to be completely deflated in case some latent pressure makes it suddenly expand, shaking the entire station while the arm is moving around. “We wouldn’t want to have that energy sitting in the BEAM module and then have it react,” said NASA’s Kenny Todd.
Bigelow Aerospace has successfully tested their expandable modules in space before, but this the first time one of their habitats has been tested on the ISS. Todd suspects the extra burden of meeting conservative specs demanded by the space station could be causing the delay. The module was packed more tightly and spent more time folded up, for instance. “It doesn’t surprise me a great deal that we ended up here,” Todd says.
But there should be plenty of time to get it right. The BEAM will be studied at the ISS for two years, although astronauts plan to venture in for only a few hours here and there. NASA hopes what they learn about the lightweight, expandable module will be useful for future trips to distant destinations like Mars.
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