Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, will be the guest on David Livingston’s “The Space Show” this Thursday, August 24, at 7 pm PDT (10 pm EDT). This will be a rare opportunity for the general public to ask Bigelow questions about his company and its future plans.

Bigelow Aerospace surprised a lot of people late Friday when the company announced that it planned to “accelerate future plans” related to the series of experimental orbital modules it planned to develop and launch. Details were sketchy, and the company said it would only provide additional details early next year, when it launches its next spacecraft, Genesis 2. The company offered an odd mix of reasons for the change, including “the outstanding performance of Genesis I, the hoped-for adequate performance of Genesis II and various additional factors—including, but not limited to, domestic and international issues forecast over the next four to five years bearing upon America’s transportation and launch deficits.” I’m not exactly sure what a “launch deficit” is, unless that’s supposed to mean difficulty finding affordable launch options for its spacecraft.

One near-term result of this is that Genesis 2 will be the only mission opportunity for Bigelow’s “Fly Your Stuff” program, where people can pay to fly photos and items into space. This is an interesting turn of events, since when I talked with Robert Bigelow last month, he suggested that the program was a key experiment in generating revenue and public interest in his company’s work. “We are very involved with experimenting—and this is a grand experiment all of its own—with outreaching to the public,” he said. “We’re captivated by the adventure here, and part of the adventure is exploring whether the public is going to be interested.”

It was ironic that Bigelow Aerospace released photos of the Dnepr launch of Genesis 1 on the same day that another Dnepr lifted off from Baikonur. Unfortunately, that launch was a failure: the rocket crashed to earth shortly after liftoff, apparently when its first-stage engines shut down. Had Bigelow’s luck been a little different, it might have been their launch that failed, leaving them uncertain about the success of their design. As it is, their next launch, which had been scheduled for late this year, may be delayed, depending on how long the Dnepr is grounded for any investigation and what payloads remain in the queue ahead of it (at least two more Dnepr launches were on the manifest between Wednesday’s failure and the Genesis 2 launch late this year, making this an unusually active year for the refurbished ICBM.)

Bigelow Aerospace released yesterday some images from the interior of the Genesis 1 module, including some objects, like photos and playing cards, floating inside. (Some of these objects are blurred, which the company attributes to the low-res imagery returned to date; future missions will have more and better cameras and more high-bandwidth communications.) These photos are similar to the ones that Robert Bigelow showed me during our interview last week, but with the non-Bigelow logos on the interior fuzzed out. As a separate page on the Bigelow site explains, the logos on the online images are pixelated because the company “did not have time to get permission from the various companies for display”. Should such permission be granted, the logos will be revealed.

For this week’s issue of The Space Review, I wrote an extended article about Bigelow Aerospace based on Robert Bigelow’s speech at the NewSpace 2006 conference Friday, a media tour of the Bigelow Aerospace factory in North Las Vegas the previous day, and the interview I had with Bigelow last week as well. The intent of the article was to provide a comprehensive overview of many of the items I mentioned in my notes from the interview last week, going into more detail where possible.

Also, I have gallery of images from Thursday’s tour, including both larger versions of images I previously posted as well as some new ones.

A day after a visit to Bigelow Aerospace’s corporate headquarters to interview Robert Bigelow, myself and a number of other reporters traveled up to the company’s manufacturing facility in an industrial park in North Las Vegas (with a spectacular view of the Las Vegas skyline) for a press conference and tour. At the press conference, Robert Bigelow and six other company employees, including project manager Eric Haakonstad, entertained questions for an hour about Genesis 1 and the company in general. A lot of the questions covered the same ground I did with Bigelow himself yesterday; MSNBC’s Alan Boyle has an excellent summary, with photos, of the event. (While those on a separate tour of the plant organized by the Space Frontier Foundation could not take photos, reporters on a separate tour could, albeit with significant restrictions, as Alan discussed in his Cosmic Log account.)

Here are a few photos of my own from the event:

A full-scale mockup of the pressure vessle of the full-sized module Bigelow is developing.

Robert Bigelow and project manager Eric Haakonstad at the press conference.

A view inside the mission control center for Genesis-1. The modern facility, with giant video screens on two walls, was completed just last month.

Several members of Genesis 1 team, as well as one of the ubiquitous (but friendly) security guards, pose in front a full-sized mockup of Genesis 1.

When most people arrive in Las Vegas, they make a beeline for the casinos. Me, I went in a different direction (literally and figuratively), paying a visit to the corporate headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas. (This is a separate location from their manufacturing facility in North Las Vegas.) I spent over an hour there interviewing Robert Bigelow about Genesis 1, the company’s future plans, and related issues. All this will appear in an article (or two) in future issues of The Space Review, but here are a few highlights:

• Genesis 1 is performing very well in orbit, and its cameras have returned “hundreds” of images, only a fraction of which have been released. They are limited to primarily low-resolution images at the moment because they’re using a lower-bandwidth UHF antenna; a slow roll of the spacecraft (which will damp out in a few weeks) makes it hard to maintain a lock on the S-band antenna.
• The images returned include some of the interior of the spacecraft, which haven’t been released yet because they include some company logos; the company is working to get permission from those companies so that they can release the logos. (The logos are there principally to help calibrate the cameras.)
• Genesis 2 is scheduled for launch from Russia late this year, either in the latter half of November or December. It will be very similar to Genesis 1 but with a few “tweaks”, including more cameras and improved life support systems.
• The company has gotten a good response to their “Fly Your Stuff” promotion, particularly flying items in the spacecraft.
• ITAR (export control) has been a huge problem for the company, since they’re launching items from Russia, although Bigelow emphasized they don’t have a problem with the people handling the export control work, but instead the policies and general bureaucracy.
• Bigelow said that up to 44 teams expressed an interest in America’s Space Prize (ASP), but with few exceptions these groups did not appear to have the wherewithal to make a serious run at the prize. Although NASA’s COTS program attracting the attention of industry these days (including teams that would otherwise have a shot as ASP; taking government funding is a disqualifying factor for the prize), he said there are no plans to change the purse size or deadline.
• While Bigelow is supportive of space tourism in general, and likes the developments going on in the suborbital arena, he thinks a much bigger market for his company’s modules will be from national space agencies, who want the prestige of a national astronaut corps and their own (albeit leased) space station. Such agencies, he noted, have much bigger pockets than individual space tourists.

There’s a lot more to the interview than these notes, so stay tuned for more in the days to come.

In an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman sees the launch of Genesis 1 last week as a key milestone towards the eventual development of space hotels. As he writes:

Only a few space tourists will be content with a short ride into orbit followed by a uncomfortable stay inside a cramped spaceplane or capsule. They will want at least a semblance of the kinds of comforts available on the cheapest package vacation. Therefore the “space hotel” is the minimum system needed to give the industry a chance to grow beyond just a limited number of hardy adventurers. A space hotel will be the one place where tourists will be able to relax and enjoy themselves without suffering from the embarrassments and claustrophobia that are inevitable when someone with minimal training flies into orbit in a capsule or small vehicle.

He notes, though, that there are many challenges ahead for the company. “The real challenge for the company and its leadership will be to see how well it handles the inevitable setbacks.”

I have been too busy to have too much to say in regards to yesterday’s successful launch of Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis 1 spacecraft (let’s see how much free time you have when you wake up to 4,500 unread emails.) A couple of good articles on the mission and its potential for orbiting hotels for space tourists (some years down the road) include SPACE.com, which interviewed some key Bigelow personnel who were at the launch site in Siberia; and, surprisingly, a local Las Vegas TV station, KLAS-TV, which got an exclusive on-camera interview with Robert Bigelow himself.

The launch of the first subscale prototype of Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable habitats is being delayed by about a month. The company announced Tuesday that the launch, which had been scheduled for June 16 (and is still listed as such on the official Roskosmos launch schedule) will be delayed to July 4-14. “This delay is necessary due to special preparations that the launch provider is continuing to make for our flight,” the company reported on its web site. (Also see an MSNBC.com article.) The company said it is still taking reservations for carrying photos and memorabilia on the Genesis 2 launch, planned for later this year; if the July launch goes well the company will contact people who made reservations to complete their transactions.