Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' rocket and space tourism company, has announced its latest ambitious project. They plan to build a commercial space station that can be used for scientific experiment centers, tourist attractions, and offices.
The space station, named Orbital Reef, is scheduled to orbit between 2025 and 2030. Blue Origin says Orbital Reef will have an internal volume equivalent to the International Space Station (ISS) and will be able to accommodate up to 10 people at a time, as quoted from The Verge, Wednesday. (27/10/2021).
Blue Origin will build Orbital Reef with space company Sierra Space. In addition, they also cooperate with several corporate and university partners such as Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions, Arizona State University.
Orbital Reef will have separate areas for residences and a science laboratory. The project is designed as a business center in space, and will have several ports that could serve as berths for modules and other spacecraft.
During the press conference, Blue Origin was reluctant to reveal how much it would cost to build Orbital Reef. But they hope NASA will become one of the regular tenants on Orbital Reef.
It is planned that passenger and cargo transportation will be handled by Boeing's Starliner rocket and Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spacecraft. But the Starliner has never flown an astronaut into orbit, and the Dream Chaser has never even been in space.
Blue Origin's New Glen rocket is planned to be used to deliver the Orbital Reef module into orbit. But so far the New Glenn rocket has never flown.
To date, Blue Origin has only been able to launch manned flights to suborbital altitudes, and has never touched orbit. So they have a lot of homework to do to realize a project as big as a space station.
NASA itself has been pushing for the development of private space stations for a long time to replace the ISS which is currently scheduled to retire in 2024. Maintenance of the ISS requires no small amount of money, for that NASA plans to fill low-Earth orbit with commercial space stations and focus its budget on sending astronaut to another planet.
Besides Blue Origin, there are currently several companies that are planning to build a space station. One of them is Axiom, which NASA collaborated with to build a space station that could attach to the ISS.