Posted on 10/08/2017 5:38:06 PM PDT by BenLurkin
"The reason we want our own airlock is this airlock is going to be five times bigger than the current airlock, and it's going to be far more commercial," Manber said in a Sept. 27 presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.
In addition to satellite deployments and experiments, he said the module will be commercial "real estate" on the station, with the ability to mount payloads on its exterior. "It's getting us more into the real estate business and space station operations," he said.
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NanoRacks has long-term ambitions to develop its own commercial station, and is part of the Ixion partnership with Space Systems Loral and United Launch Alliance to study refitting upper stages as habitation modules under a NASA Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program.
"NanoRacks has launched hundreds of payloads to the International Space Station, is currently building the first commercial airlock, and with Ixion the company plans to build and operate their own commercial space stations," Chad Anderson, chief executive of Space Angels, said in the statement about the funding round. "We're excited to partner with this incredibly experienced and passionate team that is doing so much to enable our future in space."
"We are moving rapidly into knowing when we can deploy our first commercial module," Manber said in his conference presentation. "NASA could not be more open-minded and helpful to us, and we fully anticipate very good results, making NASA comfortable that you can repurpose an upper stage and still allow NASA astronauts to be near the module."
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Jeez. A perfectly serious article about business ventures for The Third Industrial Revolution. Private enterprise in space, and you go an mess it up with those kinds of pictures.
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Got any more?
NANO — not GIGA!
bumps
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