NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — At one end of Bigelow Aerospace’s factory is a mock-up of a gargantuan home for future astronauts. With a unique design — it could be packed into a rocket, then unfurled in space — it would comfortably house a dozen people as a voluminous space station or serve as a building block of a moon base.

“It’ll be a monster spacecraft by any current standards,” said Robert T. Bigelow, the company’s namesake founder, at a news conference in February.

This is Olympus, named after the mythological home of the Greek gods and a measure of Mr. Bigelow’s ambitions for building settlements in space.

Farther down the factory floor is a long, skinny metal structure. This is a developmental version of the spine of a more modest B330 module, which the company actually plans to build. Slight in appearance compared to Olympus, it would still be much less cramped than the metal cans that make up the International Space Station.