A full-scale burst pressure test has been completed on the inflatable habitat that Sierra Space is developing as part of the NASA-funded commercial space station of Blue Origin, Orbital Reef.
The structure, the Large Integrated Flexible Environment—a.k.a. LIFE—is made of high-strength, flexible materials that could be launched as payload in a single rocket and designed to be inflated later into a solid habitat once in its low Earth orbit destination.
The pressurization-to-burst test on the LIFE structure for Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef was conducted at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The burst test demonstrated LIFE’s capabilities and provided the Blue Origin and Sierra Space with vital data to support NASA’s inflatable softgoods certification standards, the agency said.
Angela Hart, manager of NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program, described the test as an exciting milestone for the planned low Earth orbit station.
“Every successful development milestone by our partners is one more step to achieving our goal of enabling commercial low Earth orbit destinations and expanding the low Earth orbit marketplace,” she said.
A previous full-scale burst pressure test has been conducted on the LIFE habitat at Marshall in December 2023 after subscale tests also at the NASA Huntsville facility and at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
