Lockheed Martin recently destroyed an inflatable habitat that could one day house astronauts in space and for good reason. They are using this data as part of NASA’s NextSTEP program, which involves the company developing an inflatable structure technology to support space habitation in low-Earth orbit, at the Moon and other parts of our solar system.
Why conduct a burst test? Lockheed Martin needs to see just how much pressure a subscale or full-scale inflatable habitat can handle. Before the test, it was equipped with hundreds of sensors and then had multiple high-speed cameras pointed at valuable data points on where exactly the failure happens. These could also be used as large modular storage spaces or equipment hangers on the Moon and Mars.
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Our inflatable design has performed phenomenally, and we’re excited to take a comprehensive look at the data that was collected during both tests. This tech demo is the first step in proving out our inflatable habitat design, which we are confident will be one of the key enablers to make human life in space easier and allow humans to explore further into space than ever before,” said Tyler Muma, Lockheed Martin’s Softgoods Technology Lead.
