Bigelow Aerospace
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Bigelow Aerospace laid off all of its workers
Bigelow Aerospace -- the company that created the inflatable module attached to the International Space Station -- laid off 20 employees last week. Yesterday, it laid off its 68 remaining workers. According to SpaceNews, one employee described the company's decision to halt operations and let go of its employees as the results of a "perfect storm of problems," one of which was the coronavirus pandemic. A spokesperson told SpaceNews that Bigelow Aerospace plans on re-hiring the laid-off workers, but other sources are dubious of this claim.
SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace drum up support for the space hotel of the future
SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace are teaming up to cross-promote their private aerospace tech. The duo are kicking off a tour in Asia to drum up governmental and business support for the Falcon 9 rocket and BA's BA 330 floating habitat. The latter has 330 cubic meters of space and can support a crew of six for scientific experimentation, or ensuring no-one can ever out-do your bachelor party. More details about the tie up are expected just as soon as Elon Musk's company can get that DragonX to escape the atmosphere.
Visualized: Boeing's CST-100 gets you and six friends to space... for cheap!
It's not expected to make its first jaunt to outer space before 2014, but Boeing's "low-cost" Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) will allow up to seven Earthlings to travel up to 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface. The best part? Once you spend up to seven months docked at the International Space Station, you'll rely on "the aid of parachutes [as you head] to an airbag-cushioned landing on dry ground." Something tells us the crew of Jackass will be all over this in just a few years.
Experimental space hotel hurtled into orbit
Although we're not quite ready to pony up for a ticket to space just yet, billionaire Robert Bigelow is thinking way into the future by trialing a space hotel. Dubbed Genesis II, the inflatable module could eventually be used as a "hotel in space" or double as a manned space station, and considering that it only inflates once it settles in orbit, the cost of launching is substantially decreased. The experimental craft was successfully launched on board a Russian rocket, and has since established communications and "beamed back a series of images of its expanding solar panels." This endeavor is just the beginning, however, as Bigelow envisions a "full-scale space hotel" to be named Nautilus, and if you're interested in helping out (and making $50 million on the side), you've got three years to "design a craft capable of carrying five people to a height of 250 miles."[Image courtesy of Bigelow Aerospace]
