Blue Origin, Boeing and other ventures lay out ideas for commercial space stations

WASHINGTON - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has laid out a plan for building a commercial habitat for future space travelers and sending it into Earth orbit atop its New Glenn rocket. The concept is one of a dozen studies that NASA released today as part of a project to assess how crewed space operations in low Earth orbit, or LEO, could be commercialized within the next six years or so, reports Alan Boyle for Geekwire.com. Continue reading original article

The Intelligent Aerospace take:

May 29, 2019 -A dozen American companies provided studies to NASA for their plans to put commercial space stations into low Earth orbit. They included: Axiom Space, LLC, of Houston; Blue Origin, LLC, of Kent, Washington; The Boeing Company of Houston; Deloitte Consulting of Manhattan Beach, California; KBRWyle of Houston; Lockheed Martin Corporation of Littleton, Colorado; McKinsey & Company, Inc. of Washington, D.C.; NanoRacks, LLC, of Webster, Texas; Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia; Sierra Nevada Corporation of Louisville, Colorado; Space Adventures, Inc., of Vienna, Virginia; and Maxar Technologies, formerly SSL, Inc., of Palo Alto, California

According to NASA, "These companies investigated what a commercially viable industry in low-Earth orbit could look like, including: commercialization concepts and technical configurations for habitable platforms in low-Earth orbit, either through the International Space Station or a free-flying platform; business plans that explore the viability of commercial destinations; and the role of government and evolution of the space station in the roadmap to commercialization of low-Earth orbit. Observations from these studies revealed many potential markets that could be part of the future ecosystem in low-Earth orbit." NASA's study, including a brief overview of each plan, is available here.

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Jamie Whitney, Associate Editor
Intelligent Aerospace