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Nasa is about to send a giant inflatable house into space.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module – or Beam for short – is an "expandable habitat" set to visit the International Space Station next week as part of SpaceX's flight to deliver supplies to the station.


Expandable habitats "greatly increase the amount of transport volume" for space missions, Nasa explained. Because they're incredibly light, it's easy for rockets to carry them to cargo and expand once in position. The inflatable then provides astronauts with a comfortable area to live in. Crews will enter the module on a routine basis to monitor its behaviour and measure its performance, as well as examine how it performs in "the thermal environment of space".

The Dragon craft will also be delivering supplies for experiments, as well as food and living supplies, to the astronauts on the ISS.

The Beam module is the work of Bigelow Aerospace, a company founded by American motel mogul Robert Bigelow. The aerospace firm has been working on the design since 2000 and in 2013 it signed a $17.8 million deal with Nasa to develop the Beam prototype.


The module measures 10.5 feet by 13 feet and will also provide a "degree of protection" from radiation, space debris, atomic oxygen and other space weather.

Beam is set to stay attached to the ISS for at least two years while it's being tested, with the eventual hope that it could accompany astronauts on a Mars mission. Once its two year mission is over, it will be "robotically jettisoned" from the ISS, burning through the atmosphere on its descent back to Earth.

The first idea for an expandable habitat was in the 1960s, with Goodyear developing the Erectable Torus Manned Space Laboratory.