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NASA astronaut Kate Rubins inspects the Bigelow Aerospace Expandable Activity Module. It was originally designed for two years on the station, but it can now last another five years.
NASA
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Astronauts Peggy Whitson, left, and Thomas Pesquet, in Bigelow’s expandable module.
NASA
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Astronauts aboard the space station 3D printed a shield to cover one of the two radiation environment monitors in the BEAM. The shield is the white semicircular shape in the center of the photo.
NASA
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The interior of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module is seen during sensor installation and after successful expansion in May 2016.
NASA
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This is what the entrance of the BEAM module looks like.
NASA
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NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will test and replace parts in the BEAM in September.
NASA
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The Bigelow module was stowed away in a Dragon spacecraft in February 2016.
SpaceX
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ESA astronaut Tim Peake (left) and NASA astronaut Jeff Williams (right) prepare the BEAM module for expansion.
NASA
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How the Bigelow Aerospace module was expanded at the end of May 2016.
NASA
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And here’s a photo of Williams at work in the BEAM module after expansion.
NASA TV
NASA has been trying out Bigelow’s expandable habitat on its International Space Station, and the agency likes it. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module has now been installed on the station for over a year and has passed major structural tests.
So this week, NASA announced it plans to extend the life of the station’s new, expandable room. Initially, the module was to be attached to the station for two years, but NASA says it plans to extend its life by three years from now on, with two additional one-year options. The Bigelow habitat could therefore remain on the station well into the early 2020s.
At least for now, the module doesn’t exactly have a glamorous purpose on the station. NASA will use the extra space to store up to 130 “cargo transfer bags,” bags of varying sizes that were first used for storage in the space shuttle’s mid-deck lockers and later used to transport cargo to the space station. One of the real problems of the orbiting lab is excess stuff, like these bags, cluttering workspaces. Now astronauts can store dozens of them in the expandable module.
In the longer term, Bigelow Aerospace will benefit from having the module on the station for several more years. Not only can the Nevada-based company collect more data on the attachment’s performance in microgravity, it can also continue to demonstrate to NASA the viability of expandable habitats for longer-duration spaceflight.
Bigelow is part of a competition between a number of aerospace companies to develop a new space habitat for NASA, which the space agency can eventually mount in lunar orbit as a base for deep space exploration. While many of the other concepts are theoretical, Bigelow has the advantage of a working prototype that now meets NASA’s needs.
List image by NASA