Building NASA’s Deep Space Gateway

The six US companies designing ground-based prototypes for NASA’s Deep Space Gateway (DSG) station — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Bigelow Aerospace, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Orbital ATK, and a consortium called Ixion —are to receive grants totalling $65 million up to the end of this year as part of a programme NASA calls NextSTEP (Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnership), with a decision taken on which designs will go on to become flight modules in 2018 or 2019.

The DSG could potentially acclimatise crew for the long durations in space required for deep-space missions, and to develop and test systems for long-duration spaceflight and the conditions distant from Earth. It will be a space station positioned in lunar orbit, around a quarter of a million miles from Earth and well outside the protection of the magnetosphere.

Each of the six companies is developing different concepts for the station. Bigelow, whose 3m-diameter BEAM (Bigelow Expandable Activity Module) chamber is part-way through a two-year trial on the ISS, is developing another expandable structure, known as B330, as a habitat module for the DSG. Projected to be 13.7m long and 6.7m in diameter, the module is a made of a multi-layer material capable of withstanding micrometeorite strikes, and, although designed to be inflated with compressed air, should be regarded as more similar to a steel radial tyre than a balloon.