It must be entertaining to blow things up for a living. Demolitions expert. Eskom. That guy who makes balloon animals at kids’ parties. And now, Sierra Space has joined the ranks of professional exploders on behalf of the Orbital Reef space station project.
If you’re having trouble remembering it, Orbital Reef is an initiative aiming to put another large space station into orbit. Unlike the International Space Station, this one will be populated chiefly by commercial interests. Expect research and development for the benefit of companies instead of countries, in other words.
Saving the Orbital Reef
Sierra Space is one of the project partners. Its role in the development of a new orbiting space station is to come up with an inflatable habitat, called a Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE), rated for use in space. In order to achieve this, a few test habs must be blown up here on Earth.
The company exploded its first one in the middle of 2022. Its second test has also successfully blown up a space habitat — though that’s not the point of the test. The point is to find out under which conditions the world’s most expensive wicker basket (that’s what it looks like) will fail. NASA’s got a very specific threshold when it comes to sticking humans into inflatable rooms in space. According to Sierra Space, its habitat surpassed that threshold on both tests. The second test, obviously, fared better.
Next up is… further testing. Rocket science is the cliché term for something really hard for a reason. The other is brain surgery. Not killing humans in some of the most inhospitable conditions known to exist is something akin to rocket surgery. Sierra Space will test full-sized versions of its LIFE module before it’s ready to go to space. After that, the company may extend its reach beyond the Orbital Reef. It’s possible that LIFE habitats will make their way to the moon and to Mars, provided they can stand the rigours of each location.