Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin on Monday announced that it wants to launch a space station that would house up to 10 people in the second half of this decade, as the race to commercialize the cosmos heats up.
“Orbital Reef,” described in a statement as a mixed-use business park in space that would support microgravity research and manufacturing, is a joint venture with commercial space company Sierra Space, and has the support of Boeing and Arizona State University.
“For over 60 years, NASA and other space agencies have developed orbital space flight and space habitation, setting us up for commercial business to take off in this decade,” Blue Origin executive Brent Sherwood said. “We will expand access, lower the cost, and provide all the services and amenities needed to normalize space flight.”
Photo: AFP / Blue Origin
The private outpost is one of several planned as NASA considers the future of the International Space Station (ISS) after the 2020s.
The space agency holds a contract with a company called Axiom to develop a space station that would initially dock with the ISS and later become free-flying.
Space services company Nanoracks, in collaboration with Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin, last week announced a planned space station that would be operational by 2027 and be known as Starlab.
Orbital Reef would fly at an altitude of 500km, slightly above the ISS, with inhabitants experiencing 32 sunrises and sunsets a day, a fact sheet released by Blue Origin says.
It would support 10 people in a volume of 830m3, which is slightly smaller than the ISS, in futuristic modules with huge windows.
The ISS was completed in 2011 and has long been a symbol of US-Russia space cooperation, though Moscow has equivocated on the future of the partnership.
It is rated as safe until 2028 and NASA administrator Bill Nelson has said he hopes it would last until 2030, by which time NASA wants the commercial sector to step up and replace it.
Blue Origin is currently only able to fly to suborbital space with its New Shepard rocket, which blasted Star Trek actor William Shatner beyond the atmosphere earlier this month.
Its other planned projects include New Glenn, a rocket that could fly cargo and people into orbit, and a lunar lander — though it lost the moon contract to rival SpaceX and is suing NASA.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of one day building floating space colonies with artificial gravity where millions of people would work and live, freeing the Earth from pollution.
The colonies would be based on a design by Gerard O’Neill, Bezos’ physics professor at Princeton University, and would consist of counter-rotating cylinders providing artificial gravity.
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