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Successful failure: Sierra Space’s inflatable habitat blows up as planned
Sierra Space successfully inflated its space station habitat until it exploded – all according to plan.
While Sierra has conducted a series of burst tests on sub-scale units of the habitat, called Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE), this is the first on a full-scale module. As Leanne Thompson, a systems engineer at Sierra, pointed out in a recent video on the test, it took NASA 10-15 launches to send up that same volume of habitable space with the ISS. The test focused on the LIFE habitat’s pressure shell or restraint layer, which is made of expandable “softgoods” that perform like a rigid structure once they’re inflated.
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