NASA official to tour North Las Vegas aerospace company

By Richard N. Velotta

Thursday, Feb. 3, 2011 | 6:43 p.m.

The deputy administrator of NASA will be in Southern Nevada Friday to tour a North Las Vegas facility dedicated to developing a space station habitat.

Lori Garver will tour Bigelow Aerospace as part of a two-day, two-state trip to meet with entrepreneurs who are contracting with NASA to develop technologies that would keep the United States engaged in future space missions.

Garver is scheduled to meet with Robert Bigelow, president and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing an inflatable space habitat called the Sundancer.

The visit with Bigelow is the first stop in a two-day trip that will include a stop in Colorado, where Garver is scheduled to meet with executives of Sierra Nevada Space Systems, which is developing a spacecraft called the Dream Chaser. She’ll also make a stop at the University of Colorado’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Bigelow Aerospace hopes to develop by 2015 an orbiting space station pod that can be placed in space by a variety of medium-lift launch vehicles and powered with solar arrays. The company began work on its expandable space station systems in 1999 and successfully launched two spacecraft into low Earth orbit in 2006 and 2007.