A Ufologist Latest Venture, Space Hotels, Robert Bigelow

For the Las Vegas businessman, his desire to build low orbital dwellings is the ultimate gamble. He has bet $500 million of his own money on his closely held venture, Bigelow Aerospace LLC — five times what billionaire Elon Musk invested in his own space company.

“Are there enough customers out there to make this a worthwhile venture?” Foust said. “It’s yet to be seen.”
Spare Room

NASA’s award to Bigelow Aerospace means that the 3,000- pound inflatable spare room that uses a Kevlar-like fabric called Vectran will be tested to see how it withstands space debris and radiation.

The technology is based on an idea conceived in the 1990s by NASA, which let Bigelow license the patents, according to Mike Gold, director of Washington operations for Bigelow Aerospace. The company has taken the blueprints to fruition by building actual test structures, Gold said.

“He’s a capitalist in every sense of the word,” said Jay Ingham, a Bigelow vice president who previously worked for Raytheon Co. (RTN) “The guys who work hard and are big contributors do really well here.”

NASA retired its shuttle fleet in 2011 and relies on Russia for rides to space at a cost of about $63 million per astronaut. It has turned to the private industry to ferry cargo and eventually humans to the station.
Boeing, SpaceX

Bigelow needs U.S. companies such as Boeing Co. (BA)and Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, to develop lower-cost alternatives, Foust said. Otherwise, his private stations “literally won’t get off the ground,” he said.

SpaceX’s first flight last year of an unmanned cargo ship to the International Space Station signaled the start of a new era in commercial spaceflight, Bigelow said.

“I guess it seems strange or unique to other people,” he said. “To me, it’s just following a dream that I have had all of my life of doing something important that was space- related.”

The hotelier grew up in Las Vegas. During his first semester in college, his father died in a plane crash. He later graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in business. He and his wife, Diane, raised two sons.