Big (or shall we say Maximum?) news coming soon...
There's another space habitat company called Max Space. They say, "Max Space can provide the equivalent cubic volume of the ISS in space for $200M — including launch — bringing the cost down by over a hundred-fold."
The market is flooded with space stations.
The first Max Space habitat is manifested to fly with SpaceX in 2026. The goal is to have a family of scalable space habitats ranging from 20 m3 to 100 m3 to 1000 m3 through 2030. The Max Space expandable architecture offers remarkable scalability, with the potential to scale up to 10,000+ m3 megastructures, which can be launched in a single flight using Starship and New Glenn, once they’re online.
They are only two years away from putting their module into orbit. My guess is that it will be the smallest model with a volume of 20 m3, which is only slightly larger than Bigelow's Genesis. The company's website is very poor and not much can be deduced from it, such as how they intend to commercialise their product. And two years is very little time indeed - Sierra Space has been working on its LIFE module for several years now, and its flight to orbit is announced for NET 2027.A bit more information about Max Space is at: https://www.designboom.com/architecture/inflatable-space-habitats-max-spacex-2026-04-30-2024/.
Their first mission will launch in 2026 aboard a SpaceX rideshare vehicle
“We’ll go to LEO, inflate the largest inflatable to ever go to space, then let it stay up there for a while and see what happens,” Kemmer said. It will have some small customer payloads, but those are secondary. Once they prove out the concept with this small one — 2 cubic meters that expand to 20, which you might call bedroom-sized — the real thing will be much bigger, as already demonstrated on the surface.
