NASA will try again on Saturday morning to inflate a new room for the International Space Station.

During the first attempt on Thursday to pump air into the module known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or Beam, the bulbous, balloon-like structure did not expand as much as expected. Beam is a test of technology to construct soft-sided space habitats with walls made of fabric instead of metal.

This fold-up, blowup approach would help solve the problem of how to build something spacious that can be packed into the narrow payload confines of a rocket. Beam was taken to the space station last month on a Falcon 9 rocket launched by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX. The module was then attached to one of the station’s docking ports, and it remained folded up until Thursday.

The first steps of closing valves, cutting straps and releasing bolts went without a hitch. But as the crew tried to inflate it, Beam moved out only five inches toward the fully expanded length of 73 inches. The diameter reached 103 inches, but fully expanded, Beam’s diameter is meant to be 127 inches. The process was halted as engineers took a closer look.

“We ran into higher forces than our model predicted,” Jason Crusan, NASA’s director of advanced exploration systems, said in a telephone news conference on Friday.