Bigelow Aerospace

Robert Bigelow, who built the Budget Suites of America extended-stay hotel chain, founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 with the singular goal of building expandable space habitats. Rather than raise venture capital, Bigelow self-financed the company from his own wealth, an approach that gave him total control but tied the enterprise's survival to a single benefactor. By 2010 he had reportedly poured roughly $180 million of his own money into the effort, a figure that grew past $250 million by 2013, and he publicly stated he was willing to fund the company toward roughly $500 million. The company's headquarters and factory sat in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Bigelow's core technology came from NASA. In the late 1990s the agency had developed TransHab, an inflatable habitat concept for the International Space Station, before Congress canceled it amid budget and schedule pressure. In 2000 Bigelow Aerospace licensed the expandable-module technology from NASA and spent a decade refining it, layering proprietary fabric shields, including extensions of Vectran, to protect against micrometeoroids and orbital debris. The bet was that soft-goods modules could launch compact and inflate to far more usable volume than rigid metal cans, offering more room per kilogram than any conventional station module.