by COLORADO SPRINGS – Max Space wants to help humanity expand into the final frontier.
The startup is developing a range of inflatable space habitats, the largest of which could provide as much internal volume as a sports stadium. These plans, revealed by Max Space on Tuesday (April 9) here at the 39th Space Symposium, are designed to help our species make the difficult leap from their home planet.
“The problem with space today is that there is not enough habitable space in space,” Max Space co-founder Aaron Kemmer said in a statement Tuesday. “Unless we make usable space in space much cheaper, and much more, humanity’s future in space will remain limited.”
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Back in 2010, Kemmer co-founded the extraterrestrial manufacturing company Made In Space, which has sent multiple 3D printing devices to the International Space Station (ISS) over the years. (Redwire got Made In Space in 2020.)
He says the experience helped convince him that expandable habitats are the future, citing one of the Made In Space machines modified for use on the ISS.
“It’s like a three-story system on Earth, and all the engineering wasn’t going to make it work in space – it was going to get it down to a locker [size]just because there wasn’t enough real estate,” Kemmer told Space.com in an interview here at the symposium on Tuesday.
Expandable habitats, as the name suggests, launch in a compressed form to fit inside rocket fairings but increase in size significantly when deployed in space. As such, they offer much more bang for the buck volume-wise than traditional “tin can” modular designs.
An expandable habitat with 100 cubic meters (3,530 cubic feet) of pressurized volume, for example, would be “at least an order of magnitude cheaper” than a comparable metallic one, Kemmer said. (For perspective: The ISS adds 388 cubic meters, or 13,700 cubic feet, of habitable volume, not including the space provided by visiting vehicles.)
This is not a sci-fi concept; three expandable module prototypes are currently orbiting the Earth. They are Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, which were free flyers launched in 2006 and 2007 respectively, and the Bigelow Expandable Action Module (BEAM), which has been attached to the ISS since 2016.
All three were built by Bigelow Aerospace, a Nevada-based company, which closed its doors in 2020. The thrust restraints for Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were designed and manufactured by Thin Red Line Aerospace, a company a small Canadian company run by Maxim de Jong — another co-founder of Max Space.
The new startup, which has been in operation for about a year, is commercializing Thin Red Line Aerospace’s technology, Kemmer and de Jong said. But that technology isn’t just a Genesis iteration.
“It’s a very, very different approach, where you’re putting fibers in an uncoupled situation where they’re not in conflict with each other,” de Jong told Space.com on Tuesday. The result, he and Kemmer said, is a cost-effective module that expands predictably and reliably, and is highly scalable to larger sizes.
The new technology will get its first test outside of Earth exactly two years from now, if everything goes according to plan: Max Space has booked a place on a shared SpaceX launch in 2026.
That mission will launch a module the size of two large cases into orbit. However, that’s the compact configuration of the habitat. Once deployed, it will expand to a pressure volume of 20 cubic meters (706 cubic feet).
This deployment will set a new record for expandable habitats. Both Genesis prototypes have 11.5 cubic meters (406 cubic feet) of internal volume, while the BEAM has 16 cubic meters (565 cubic feet).
Max Space has already built a full-size prototype of the first flight unit, which the company is using for ground testing, Kemmer said. It has begun manufacturing the flying vehicle, which will have no life support systems but will have the same shielding and strength as human-rated versions.
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Max Space plans to continue moving quickly after this pioneering module is in orbit. The startup aims to launch its first 100-cubic-meter (3,531-cubic-foot) module in 2027 and a 1,000-cubic-meter (35,314-cubic-foot) rise by 2030. Even larger versions could launch after that. , aboard SpaceX’s Starship. megarocket or Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicle, the company said.
The goal is to provide different destinations for a range of customers, from pharmaceutical companies looking to mass-produce medicines in microgravity to commercial space stations looking to expand their living space to film studios looking to film in orbit.
“We have several space production companies that we are talking to,” Kemmer said. The company has already secured several customer contracts, including from the US Space Force, he said.
But Earth orbit will only be the starting point for Max Space modules, if all goes according to plan.
“My dream is to have a city on the moon before I die,” said Kemmer. “So I look at this, this is the habitat, the structures, that are going to go inside the lava tubes buried under the [lunar] surface.”
The company’s modules would then make their way to Mars, if all goes well, as Max Space wants to be a major enabler of extraterrestrial settlement. In fact, that’s why Kemmer and de Jong founded the company – to help humanity expand its footprint in the solar system.
“That was the whole reason,” said Kemmer.
