A NEW video has revealed inflatable space homes being blown up due to immense pressure.
American aerospace company Lockheed Martin has been developing inflatable structures that can house astronauts in space.
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However, to ensure they are safe for human habitation, they need to test their pressure points.
Lockheed Martin has documented the tests in a new video that shows the habitats being blown to smithereens.
Dubbed the “ultimate burst pressure test,” the experiment was conducted in early December at Waterton Canyon facility in Colorado.
The test basically consists of overpressurizing the inflatable habitats to the point of explosion.
“What’s a burst test? Pretty close to what it sounds like: a test that pressurizes a subscale or full-scale inflatable habitat until it literally bursts,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement.
“The goal of the burst is to test the strength of the habitat many times beyond what it will experience in space to validate its design – similar to the structural loads testing typically done on other spacecraft like Orion,” the statement continued.
In the video, viewers can see the pressure building within a habitat until it bursts at 285 pounds per square inch, per Space.com.
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How does it work?
The test unit was equipped with hundreds of sensors and monitored with high-speed cameras.
This provided thousands of data points into exactly how and where the expandable habitat failed.
Researchers at Lockheed Martin are determined to make the habitat suitable for space pressures.
“Our inflatable design has performed phenomenally, and we’re excited to take a comprehensive look at the data that was collected during both tests,” said Tyler Muma, Lockheed Martin’s Softgoods Technology Lead.
“This tech demo is the first step in proving out our inflatable habitat design, which we are confident will be one of the key enablers to make human life in space easier and allow humans to explore further into space than ever before.”
In the future, the company hopes to advance its inflatable technology to enable larger and more diverse living spaces in extreme environments.
“This is critical to ensure that our design can support multiple missions while continuing to keep humans safe as they live and work in space further from Earth and for longer stretches than ever before,” Muma said.
