Bigelow Aerospace - Las Vegas - Soars with Private Space Station Deals

A private space company offering room on inflatable space habitats for research has found a robust international market, with eager clients signing up from space agencies, government departments and research groups.

Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, chief of Bigelow Aerospace, has been busy marketing his private space modules, an outreach effort leading to six deals being signed with clients this year.

The deals, in the form of memorandums of understanding, involve Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Australia and the United Kingdom.

"These are countries that do not want to be hostage to just what the International Space Station may or may not deliver," Bigelow told SPACE.com in an exclusive interview. [Bigelow Aerospace plans private moon bases.]

Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999, headquartered in Las Vegas, drawing upon his construction, real estate, and hotel savvy to forge the use of expandable space structures. To date, he has spent more than $200 million to hammer out his business plan for space.

Steel in the air

Some of that private cash was spent to hurl two of his firm's prototype expandable space modules into orbit. The company's Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 test modules, lofted in July 2006 and in June 2007, served as forerunners to ever-larger and human-rated space structures.

More recently, some $20 million of Bigelow's cash has flowed into a sprawling, 185,000 square-foot expansion to his North Las Vegas facilities, a building that enables the churning out of bigger space habitats.

"That expansion is currently under way. We broke ground a few months ago. We've got a lot of steel in the air," Bigelow said. But more newsworthy, he said, is the signing of memorandums of understanding to make use of the company's expandable space structures.

"I'm also in the middle of developing a new client leasing guide that will be available toward the end of the year. It will have new and exciting pricing opportunities that are very dramatic," Bigelow said."We want to open up the window and doors for a lot of participation for folks that need to spend less."

Robust and global

A question that continues to float through the halls of NASA and the Congress: Is there a commercial market for utilizing space?

"We've got a very certain and loud answer to that. Not only is there a commercial market, but it's a one that's robust and global," said Michael Gold, director of Washington, D.C., operations and business growth for Bigelow Aerospace.

The memorandums have been signed with what Gold said the firm terms as "sovereign clients" – the result of a relatively modest effort to pulse "international astronautics opportunities" with countries large and small.

Bigelow said what they have found is a hunger by clients to do activities in space far beyond just microgravity experimentation.

"That is what this new leasing guide is going to expose," Bigelow said. "It's encouraging to see the enthusiasm. They all have different reasons, different ways in which they see using our facilities — what I call 'dynamic assets' in the new leasing guide — to benefit them. It can change the face of a nation."

READ MORE:    Space.com