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BC-based company (Aluula) partners with MaxSpace to make expandable habitats for astronauts to live on the moon in 2026

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The media advisory/news release about Aluula and its role in NASA’s (US National Aeronautics and Space Agency) proposed moon habitat was received via email back in June 2024. I’m glad I waited as I found a very detailed story by Devin Coldeway about the proposed moon habitat that wasn’t published until late July.2024.

First, some early news about Aluula and NASA, from an April 22, 2024 article by Nelson Bennett for Business in Vancouver,

A Victoria [British Columbia, Canada] composite materials company that developed a super-strong, lightweight polyethylene material used in a range out outdoor recreation equipment could soon be used by astronauts in space in inflatable space habitats.

Max Space, an American company that is developing expandable space habitats, is now incorporating composite materials made by Aluula Composites (TSX-V:AUUA).

Aluula’s innovation was developing a heat fusion process for working with ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) to make a super-tough lightweight material.

It is being used as part of a custom laminate that adds strength and durability to structural elements to the Max Space habitat, “making it possible to create a large living and working area at a fraction of the weight and transport costs of traditional crew modules,” Aluula said in a press release.

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Here’s more about the NASA mission from a January 3, 2024 NASA news release,

NASA announced Tuesday [January 2, 2024] updates to its Artemis campaign that will establish the foundation for long-term scientific exploration at the Moon, land the first woman and first person of color on the lunar surface, and prepare for human expeditions to Mars for the benefit of all. To safely carry out these missions, agency leaders are adjusting the schedules for Artemis II and Artemis III to allow teams to work through challenges associated with first-time developments, operations, and integration.

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With Artemis, NASA will explore more of the Moon than ever before, learn how to live and work away from home, and prepare for future human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, exploration ground systems, and Orion spacecraft, along with the human landing system, next-generation spacesuits, Gateway lunar space station, and future rovers are NASA’s foundation for deep space exploration.

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The June 20, 2024 Aluula media advisory/news release (received via email) describes the company’s involvement this way,

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A small company on Canada’s west coast is playing a big role to help astronauts return to the moon in 2026.

ALUULA Composites recently signed an agreement with Max Space, an American company, to use its innovative composite material to build space habitats on the moon. The company’s ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) laminate will be used to create a large living and working area for NASA’s astronauts when they return to the moon in September 2026. 

The innovative material was selected because it has eight times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel and is extremely durable, which is ideal for space travel.

The first Max Space inflatable space habitat is slated to launch with SpaceX in 2026. The Max Space inflatables can be delivered into space in very small packages and then unfolded and expanded to create a much larger work space.

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Emily Mertz’s July 16, 2024 article for Global TV news provides a few more details, Note: Links have been removed,

A small West Coast company is helping astronauts return to the moon in 2026. ALUULA Composites has signed on to provide its durable, lightweight fabric to build space habitats.

The Max Space inflatables can be transported in very small packages and then expanded to create a much larger workspace.

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“It [Aluula’s ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) laminate] was actually originated by a bunch of engineers, chemists and wind sport enthusiasts. When you’re on the water, using a kite or a wing, you need something that’s very durable and very light and it was developed in that context.” [said ALUULA president and CEO Sage Berryman]

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The B.C. company, which is fairly young — it started in 2020 — is also committed to sustainability.

“It’s the first material that’s been done as a composite not using glues, so that also allows it to be recycled at the end of its useful life, which is pretty different in a material that’s polyethylene — plastic-based,” Berryman said.

“Our goal is to make products that are able to be fully circular and that’s an exciting thing as well.”

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“Having these opportunities to have these unique materials in unique applications is really exciting. And when you start talking about a project that’s not a huge project for us, but it’s huge in its meaningfulness, when you’re working with Max Space that’s working with NASA that’s going up on SpaceX, it is exciting,” she said.

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Mertz’s July 16, 2024 article contains some news videos and about the project and related space information.

Space habitat details

Devin Coldeway’s July 27, 2024 article for TechCrunch and republished yahoo! news tells a fascinating story about space habitats with a special emphasis on the one being developed for NASA’s Artemis campaign, Note: Links have been removed,

Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026

Working and even living in space has shifted from far-off fantasy to seemingly inevitable reality, but the question remains: what exactly will the next generation of space habitation look like? For Max Space, the answer is clear, and has been for decades — centuries, even. A new generation of expandable habitats could offer both safety and enough room to stretch your legs, and the first one is going up in 2026.

The startup is led by Aaron Kemmer, formerly of Made in Space, and Maxim de Jong, an engineer who has studiously avoided the limelight despite being the co-creator of expandable habitats like the one currently attached to the International Space Station.

They believe that the breakout moment for this type of in-space structure is due to arrive any year now. By positioning themselves as a successor to — and fundamental improvement on — the decades-old designs being pursued by others, they can capture what may eventually be a multi-billion-dollar market.

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Expandable habitats go back a long ways, but their first real use was in the TransHab project at NASA in the 1990s, where the fundamental approach was developed.

Contrary to their appearance, expandables aren’t just big balloons. The visible outer layer is, like with many spacecraft, just a thin one to reflect light and dissipate heat. The structure and strength lie inside, and since Transhab the established convention has been the “basket weave” technique.

In this method, straps of kevlar and other high-strength materials are lined up in alternating directions and manually stitched together, and upon expansion form a surface like a woven basket, with the internal pressure distributed evenly across all the thousands of intersections.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

De Jong, through his company Thin Red Line Aerospace, worked successfully with Bigelow Aerospace to develop and launch this basket-weave structure, but he had his doubts from the start about the predictability of so many stitches, overlaps, and interactions. A tiny irregularity could lead to a cascading failure even well below safety thresholds.

“I looked at all these straps, and as a field guy I was thinking, this is a cluster. As soon as you’re over or under pressure, you don’t know what percentage of the load is going to be transferred in one direction or another,” he said. “I never found a solution for it.”

He was quick to add that the people working on basket-weave designs today (primarily at Sierra Nevada and Lockheed Martin) are extremely competent and have clearly advanced the tech far beyond what it was in the early 2000s, when Bigelow’s pioneering expandable habitats were built and launched. (Genesis I and II are still in orbit today after 17 years, and the BEAM habitat has been attached to the ISS since 2016.)

But mitigation isn’t a solution. Although basket-weave, with its flight heritage and extensive testing, has remained unchallenged as the method of choice for expandables, the presence of a sub-optimal design somewhere in the world haunted De Jong [sic], in the way such things always haunt engineers. Surely there was a way to do this that was strong, simple, and safe.

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Mylar and Bernoulli

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As he [de Jong] balefully contemplated the helium-filled Mylar, something about it struck him: “Every volume that you can put something in has load in two directions. A kid’s Mylar balloon, though… there are two discs and all these wrinkles — all the stress is on one axis. This is a mathematical anomaly!”

The shape taken by the balloon essentially redirects the forces acting on it so that pressure really only pulls in one direction: away from where the two halves connect. Could this principle be applicable at a larger scale? De Jong [sic] rushed to the literature to look up the phenomenon, only to find this structure had indeed been documented — 330 years ago, by the French mathematician James Bernoulli.

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This was both gratifying and perhaps a little humiliating, even if Bernoulli had not intended this interesting anomaly for orbital habitation.

“Humility will get you so far. Physicists and mathematicians knew all this, from the 17th century. I mean, Bernoulli didn’t have access to this computer — just ink on parchment!” he told me. “I’m reasonably bright, but nobody works in fabrics; in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. You have to be honest, you have to look at what other people are doing, and you have to dig, dig, dig.”

By forming Bernoulli’s shape (called an isotensoid) out of cords, or “tendons,” every problem with expandables more or less solves itself, De Jong [sic] explains.

“It’s structurally determinant. That means if I just take a cord of a certain length, that will define all the geometry: the diameter, the height, the shape — and once you have those, the pressure is the PSI at the equator, divided by the number of cords. And one cord doesn’t affect the others, you know exactly how strong one cord needs to be; everything is predictable,” he said.

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It’s stupidly simple to make.”

All the important forces are simply tension on these cords (96 of them in the prototypes, each rated to 17,000 pounds), pulling on anchors at either end of the shape. And as you might guess from suspension bridges and other high-tension structures, we know how to make this type of connection very, very strong. Gaps for docking rings, windows, and other features are simple to add.

The way the tendons deform can also be adjusted to different shapes, like cylinders or even the uneven interiors of a Moon cave. (De Jong [sic] was very excited about that news — an inflatable is a highly suitable solution for a lunar interior habitat.)

With the pressurized structure so reliable, it can be skinned with flight-tested materials already used to insulate, block radiation and micrometeoroids, and so on; since they aren’t load bearing, that part of the design is similarly simple. Yet the whole thing compresses to a pancake only a few inches thin, which can be folded up or wrapped around another payload like a blanket.

The biggest inflatables anyone has made, and we did with a team of five people in six months,” De Jong [sic] said — though he added that “the challenges of its correct implementation are surprisingly complex” and credited that team’s expertise.

What De Jong [sic] had done is discover, or perhaps rediscover, a method for making an enclosure in space that had comparable structural strength to machined metal, but using only a tiny fraction of the mass and volume. And he lost no time getting to work on it. But who would fly it?

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Thin Red Line has seen plenty of its creations go to orbit. But this new expandable faced a long, uphill battle. For spaceflight, established methods and technologies are strongly favored, leading to a catch-22: you need to go to space to get flight heritage, and you need flight heritage to go to space.

Falling launch costs and game investors have helped break this loop in recent years, but it’s still no simple thing to get manifested on a launch vehicle.

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… Max Space, a startup built specifically to commercialize the new approach — the name is both a reference to having more space in space, and a tribute to (Maxim) De Jong, whom Kemmer [Aaron Kemmer, cp-founder] thought deserved a bit more recognition after working for decades in relative anonymity (“which suits me just fine,” he noted).

Their first mission will launch in 2026 aboard a SpaceX rideshare vehicle, and act as a proof of concept so they can get flight heritage, which is one advantage extant expandables have over isotensoids.

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If you have the time and the interest, Coldeway’s July 27, 2024 article is a good read with a lot of informative images such as this one

Caption: The 20-cubic-meter habitat deflated to a 2-cubic-meter pancake, or “planar configuration.” Credit: Max Space? [downloaded from https://ca.news.yahoo.com/max-space-reinvents-expandable-habitats-150000556.html]

Aluula can be found here.

One last thing, it looks like the deal was originally announced with Thin Red Line Aerospace in a December 12, 2022 Aluula news release,

We are excited to announce that ALUULA Composites is supporting Thin Red Line Aerospace in the development of leading-edge application hardware for future NASA lunar and Mars missions. 

“Their unique range of technical attributes combined with impressive strength to weight ratio specifications, make ALUULA Composite materials very well suited to the demanding requirements of technology in space.” Stated Thin Red Line Aerospace President, Maxim de Jong. 

“We continue to find new and exciting ways in which our process enables and enhances composite materials to satisfy very specific technical objectives, and our work with Thin Red Line is another great example of what is possible with our materials and unique expertise.” Said ALUULA Composites COO, John Zimmerman. 

Air & Cosmos International Announcement: https://aircosmosinternational.com/article/aluula-composites-selected-for-future-nasa-lunar-and-mars-missions-3364

JEC Composites Announcement: https://www.jeccomposites.com/news/aluula-composites-selected-for-future-nasa-mars-missions/ 

I guess they needed one more player, i.e., Max Space, to get ready for the launch.

US announces fusion energy breakthrough

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Nice to learn of this news, which is on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) news online website. From a December 13, 2022 news item provided by Associated Press (Note: the news item was updated to include general description and some Canadian content at about 12 pm PT) ,

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Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, [emphasis mine] something called net energy gain, the Energy Department said.

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Peter Behr’s December 13, 2022 article on Politico.com about the US Department of Energy’s big announcement also breaks the news,

The Department of Energy announced Tuesday [December 12, 2022] that its scientists have produced the first ever fusion reaction that yielded more energy than the reaction required, an essential step in the long path toward commercial fusion power, officials said.

The experiment Dec. 5 [2022], at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, took a few billionths of second. But laboratory leaders said today that it demonstrated for the first time that sustained fusion power is possible.

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Behr explains what nuclear fusion is but first he touches on why scientists are so interested in the process, from his December 13, 2022 article,

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In theory, nuclear fusion could produce massive amounts of energy without producing lost-lasting radioactive waste, or posing the risk of meltdowns. That’s unlike nuclear fission, which powers today’s reactors.

Fission results when radioactive atoms — most commonly uranium — are split by neutrons in controlled chain reactions, creating lighter atoms and large amounts of radiation and energy to produce electric power.

Fusion is the opposite process. In the most common approach, swirling hydrogen isotopes are forced together under tremendous heat to create helium and energy for power generation. This is the same process that powers the sun and other stars. But scientists have been trying since the mid-20th century to find a way to use it to generate power on Earth.

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There are two main approaches to making fusion happen and I found a description for them in an October 2022 article about local company, General Fusion, by Nelson Bennett for Business in Vancouver magazine (paper version),

Most fusion companies are pursuing one of two approaches: Magnet [sic] or inertial confinement. General fusion is one of the few that is taking a more hybrid approach ¬ magnetic confinement with pulse compression.

Fusion occurs when smaller nuclei are fused together under tremendous force into larger nuclei, with a release of energy occurring in the form of neutrons. It’s what happens to stars when gravitational force creates extreme heat that turns on the fusion engine.

Replicating that in a machine requires some form of confinement to squeeze plasma ¬ a kind of super-hot fog of unbound positive and negative particles ¬ to the point where nuclei fuse.

One approach is inertial confinement, in which lasers are focused on a small capsule of heavy hydrogen fuel (deuterium and tritium) to create ignition. This takes a tremendous amount of energy, and the challenge for all fusion efforts is to get a sustained ignition that produces more energy than it takes to get ignition ¬ called net energy gain.

The other main approach is magnetic confinement, using powerful magnets in a machine called a tokomak to contain and squeeze plasma into a donut-shaped form called a torus.

General Fusion uses magnets to confine the plasma, but to get ignition it uses pistons arrayed around a spherical chamber to fire synchronously to essentially collapse the plasma on itself and spark ignition.

General Fusion’s machine uses liquid metal spinning inside a chamber that acts as a protective barrier between the hot plasma and the machine ¬ basically a sphere of plasma contained within a sphere of liquid metal. This protects the machine from damage.

The temperatures generated in fusion ¬ up to to 150 million degrees Celsius ¬ are five to six times hotter than the core of the sun, and can destroy machines that produce them. This makes durability a big challenge in any machine.

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The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) issued a December 13, 2022 news release, which provides more detail about their pioneering work, Note: I have changed the order of the paragraphs but all of this is from the news release,

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Fusion is the process by which two light nuclei combine to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing a large amount of energy. In the 1960s, a group of pioneering scientists at LLNL hypothesized that lasers could be used to induce fusion in a laboratory setting. Led by physicist John Nuckolls, who later served as LLNL director from 1988 to 1994, this revolutionary idea became inertial confinement fusion, kicking off more than 60 years of research and development in lasers, optics, diagnostics, target fabrication, computer modeling and simulation and experimental design.

To pursue this concept, LLNL built a series of increasingly powerful laser systems, leading to the creation of NIF [National Ignition Facility], the world’s largest and most energetic laser system. NIF — located at LLNL in Livermore, California — is the size of a sports stadium and uses powerful laser beams to create temperatures and pressures like those in the cores of stars and giant planets, and inside exploding nuclear weapons.

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LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.

If you want to see some really excited comments from scientists just read the LLNL’s December 13, 2022 news release. Even the news release’s banner is exuberant,

Behr peers into the future of fusion energy, from his December 13, 2022 article,

Fearful that China might wind up dominating fusion energy in the second half of this century, Congress in 2020 told DOE [Department of Energy] to begin funding development of a utility-scale fusion pilot plant that could deliver at least 50 megawatts of power to the U.S. grid.

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In September [2022], DOE invited private companies to apply for an initial $50 million in research grants to help fund development of detailed pilot plant plans.

“We’re seeking strong partnerships between DOE and the private sector,” a senior DOE official told POLITICO’s E&E News recently. The official was not willing to speak on the record, saying the grant process is ongoing and confidential.

As the competition proceeds, DOE will set technical milestones or requirements, challenging the teams to show how critical engineering challenges will be overcome. DOE’s goal is “hopefully to enable a fusion pilot to operate in the early 2030s,” the official added.

At least 15 U.S. and foreign fusion companies have submitted requests for an initial total of $50 million in pilot plant grants, and some of them are pursuing the laser-ignition fusion process that Lawrence Livermore has pioneered, said Holland. He did not name the companies because the competition is confidential.

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I wonder if General Fusion whose CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Greg Twinney declared, “Commercializing fusion energy is within reach, and General Fusion is ready to deliver it to the grid by the 2030s …” (in a December 12, 2022 company press release) is part of the US competition.

I noticed that General Fusion lists this at the end of the press release,

… Founded in 2002, we are headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with additional centers co-located with internationally recognized fusion research laboratories near London, U.K., and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), like the LLNL, is a US Department of Energy research facility.

As for General Fusion’s London connection, I have more about that in my October 28, 2022 posting “Overview of fusion energy scene,” which includes General Fusion’s then latest news about a commercialization agreement with the UKAEA (UK Atomic Energy Authority) and a ‘fusion’ video by rapper Baba Brinkman along with the overview.