The applause in Sierra Space's control room was thunderous, despite the "disaster" they had just watched: the model of a piece of the future space station they had built exploded before their eyes. They did not go crazy, and did not do so out of desperation or an attempt to cheer up after failure; The explosion of a piece of the space station was deliberate, and in fact considered a huge success. We used ChatGPT to explain the reason for this strange joy:
According to a video posted on the Colorado-based company's YouTube channel yesterday, on August 17 it deliberately destroyed its latest prototype. This prototype consisted of a metal plate, which acted as a substitute for a window or other structural elements. The goal was to simulate the pressures and forces that future space stations might encounter in the unforgiving environment of space, to test the durability of the company's technology.
Such "explosion tests" play a crucial role in the development of technologies for future space stations. The supplier of the materials for the prototype, and eventually for the final pieces of the space station scheduled to be ready in 2030, is ILC Dover, a Delaware company that specializes in highly durable materials for use in space missions. In this case, the main material is called vectran, a fabric that becomes rigid when inflated, which should ensure that the space 'rooms' it will create retain their shape and function.
Sierra Space's goal is to create inflatable 'rooms' for the Orbital Reef space station, a project led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company that aims to create a new space station to replace the old International Space Station that is soon to be retired and crash on Earth. The project is being carried out by private entities, with funding from NASA in the early stages. NASA also 'donated' Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to this experiment. In addition to the inflatable 'rooms', Sierra is also working on a spacecraft to transport cargo and people between Earth and the new station.
The reason the results of the explosion delighted the company's employees so much was that they showed a margin of 33% above the pressure resistance certification standard for a full-scale module, marking an improvement of almost 20% over previous designs. The company now plans to build a similar model on a larger scale, which will be almost identical to the LIFE module (so it is called) that is scheduled to be launched into space in the next decade.
Sierra is not alone in operating private companies designed to replace the old government-operated stations: one private station is scheduled to begin operations as early as 2028, and another group of companies intends to take advantage of the existing International Space Station to begin building a new space station as early as 2026, by connecting independent modules to it, and eventually disconnecting them from the station center and connecting them to each other when the station itself ceases operations and crashes.
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