* Astronomy

Bigelow's inflatable space stations

Boeing is building its Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 space capsule to take humans into orbit. As reported by Sen, the recent drop tests of Boeing's CST-100 were carried out with help from another commercial space business, Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow Aerospace plans to use the CST-100 to ferry customers to and from its planned Bigelow Orbiting Space Complex, an inflatable space station.
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In New Space Race, Enter the Entrepreneurs

At the Bigelow Aerospace factory here, the full-size space station mockups sitting on the warehouse floor look somewhat like puffy white watermelons. The interiors offer a hint of what spacious living in space might look like.
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A space holiday is as futuristic a holiday as can be imagined, until that is, one of the worlds trillionnaires decides to delve deep into the earths core for, what else, a grounded leisure experience. For the time being, the worlds rich are headed up, up and away. By 2012, Robert Bigelow, the man behind the first hotel in the Milky Way, hopes to float (if youll pardon the pun) a four-week stay in space at about $ 15 million. Add to that about $ 20 million a ticket via the Russian Space Agency to get there and no prizes for guessing whether this will be billed as a luxury trip. Interestingly, flights are already booked until 2009 for short individual sojourns. For those who dont know their Mars from their Mercury, Santosh George Kulangara from Kerala is going to be the first Indian space tourist.

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An inflatable shell for satellites that would allow people to enter and make repairs has been patented. The patent description also points out that radar stealth technology could be built into the shell, suggesting possible military applications.

The patent was awarded to Bigelow Aerospace in November 2005. The company is based in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, and is best known for its plans to build orbiting hotels for space tourists. It launched a one-third scale prototype called Genesis I in July, which is still in orbit

The shell would also block the view of any overly curious satellites nearby, by shielding most of the satellite's working parts.

"There would not be any visible way to determine the type of equipment housed in the craft" the patent notes.

The colour of the shell could also be chosen to make the whole structure difficult to spot.
These characteristics seem to have been chosen to attract interest and development funds from the US military.

"This hits on two of the buzz areas that I know DARPA and the Department of Defense have been looking at. The DoD has talked about modular satellites, where you can go in and do maintenance" - Dan King, a former US air force engineer who now heads King Space Research in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US.

Instead of sending up a new satellite, an old one could be refurbished to improve its capabilities. The US military has also expressed an interest in ways to hide satellites from enemies.

"It's intriguing but it hasn't proven out yet. I could give you tons of projects where people spent millions or billions of dollars but it never went anywhere" - Dan King.

No one at Bigelow Aerospace authorised to discuss the satellite patent was available for comment.

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