{"id":131682,"date":"2021-12-03T01:22:42","date_gmt":"2021-12-03T09:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/nasa-backs-blue-origins-orbital-reef-space-station"},"modified":"2021-12-03T01:22:42","modified_gmt":"2021-12-03T09:22:42","slug":"nasa-backs-blue-origins-orbital-reef-space-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/nasa-backs-blue-origins-orbital-reef-space-station","title":{"rendered":"NASA backs Blue Origin\u2019s Orbital Reef space station"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasa-backs-blue-origins-orbital-reef-space-station2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Following October\u2019s news that Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin spaceflight company planned to build its own commercial space station in low Earth orbit, NASA announced on Thursday it has selected the program for funding through a Space Act Agreement to further develop the station\u2019s design. The funding is part of NASA\u2019s Commercial LEO Development program, which aims to \u201cdevelop a robust commercial space economy in LEO, including supporting the development of commercially owned and operated LEO destinations.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are pleased that NASA supports the development of Orbital Reef, a revolutionary approach to making Earth orbit more accessible to diverse customers and industries,\u201d Brent Sherwood, Senior Vice President of Advanced Development Programs for Blue Origin, said in a prepared statement. The station would be an orbital \u201cmixed-use space business park\u201d that would offer any number of turnkey services as well as reduced operational costs for burgeoning low-g industries \u201cin addition to meeting the ISS partners\u2019 needs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Blue Origin is partnering with Sierra Space in this project with the former focusing on the architecture and infrastructure of the station \u2014 everything from its design and construction to managing lift logistics using the New Glenn heavy launch system \u2014 while the latter is tasked with developing the station\u2019s LIFE (Large Integrated Flexible Environment). Boeing is also helping out, designing the operations-maintenance-science module and leveraging its Starliner crew capsule. Genesis Engineering Solutions is involved as well. It\u2019s working on a single person spacecraft that tourists and employees alike will be able to putter around in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following October\u2019s news that Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin spaceflight company planned to build its own commercial space station in low Earth orbit, NASA announced on Thursday it has selected the program for funding through a Space Act Agreement to further develop the station\u2019s design. The funding is part of NASA\u2019s Commercial LEO Development program, which [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,43,39,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-business","category-economics","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}