The link below goes to a short video at Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow is in the business of making a commercial space station and they seem to be well on their way. I can’t say that the odds of success are good, but they it is not impossible that they could put a commercial space station in orbit.

C.M. Kornbluth’s best novel Takeoff was about a commercial space flight venture, and of course, Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon was about an entrepreneur who financed the exploration of space. For a while it looked like only governments could finance space exploration, but now there is good reason to believe that the technology is cheap enough so that someone like Virgin Galactic, Spacex, Blue Origin, UP Aerospace, or Bigelow could actually take over the exploration of space. (There should be a mutual fund that invests in these companies.)

I applied for a job at Bigelow today. I am available if they need anyone over the age of 50 to check out their space station when it gets launched. Actually, I’ll probably be over 60 by then.

Bigelow had a “Fly Your Stuff” promotion where you could put things on one of their space flights. The video in the link shows the stuff all drifting around in microgravity. It is evocative of the computer Wintermute in Gibson’s Count Zero that became an artist in an abandoned space station.

Bigelow Aerospace