If it weren’t for the lack of tourists, the space-hotel business would be booming.

Someday Airbnb-E.T. will come along and disrupt the inflatable space-hotel industry, but first there has to be such a sector. Inflatables meant for life on Mars and the moon are said to be possible right now–hopefully they’re superior to the average Earth cruise ship–but the stratosphere won’t become a tourist trap until we’re ready for takeoff. Until Musk and many others can put us on another planet, such outfits depend on government contracts with NASA to sustain and develop them.

From Emily Calandrelli’s Techcrunch piece on the topic:

Bigelow Aerospace was founded over 15 years ago by Robert Bigelow who made his fortune from his ownership of the Budget Suites of America. Bigelow originally licensed inflatable habitat technology from NASA after Congress cancelled their expandable habitat project known as TransHab in 2000.

However, the concept of space-based inflatables dates back to the early 60’s. In fact, NASA’s first communications satellite, Echo 1, was a spacecraft based on a balloon design. While the inflatable technology at the time worked sufficiently for satellites, available materials, like rubber, simply wouldn’t cut it for crewed missions.

In recent years, advanced materials have made human-rated inflatable habitats possible. Bigelow Aerospace was founded on the premise that space tourists would be interested in staying in space hotels orbiting the Earth. The company successfully launched its first (uncrewed) modules, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, in 2006 and 2007, and they’re both still in orbit today.

Unfortunately, Bigelow Aerospace was a bit ahead of their time. The company was working to perfect space hotels before private launch vehicles were ready to launch people (paying space hotel customers) into orbit. These factors contributed to a mass-layoff of 30-50 employees from their 150-person workforce earlier this year. Even now, human-rated vehicles won’t be ready until 2017 or 2018.

So in the meantime, Bigelow Aerospace has pursued contracts with NASA.•