Louisville, Colorado, January 22, 2024 – Sierra Space, a leading commercial space company building the first end-to-end business and technology platform in space, has achieved a groundbreaking milestone by successfully designing, manufacturing, assembling and testing its first full-scale, expandable space station structure, alongside exclusive softgoods technology partner ILC Dover.
By the Numbers:
- Company’s first stress test of a full-size, inflatable space station structure
- Test unit stood over 20’ tall and was comparable in size to an average family home
- The article was 300 m³ in volume, or 1/3rd the volume of the Intl. Space Station
- Test results exceeded NASA’s recommended x4 safety levels by 27%
The pressure shell for Sierra Space’s LIFE™ (Large Integrated Flexible Environment) habitat is made of expandable “softgoods,” or woven fabrics that perform like a rigid structure once inflated. During an Ultimate Burst Pressure (UBP) test, the teams inflate the test article until it fails, which helps determine how strong its softgoods materials would be under extreme stresses in the harsh environment of space. The full-scale unit in this test reached 77 psi before it burst, which well exceeds (+27%) NASA’s recommended level of 60.8 psi (maximum operating pressure of 15.2 psi multiplied by a safety factor of four).