While working and even living in space has gone from a distant dream to an inevitable reality, the question remains: what will the next generation of space habitats look like? For Max Space, the answer is clear, and has been for decades, even centuries: a new generation of expandable habitats could offer both safety and enough room to stretch your legs, with the first space habitat scheduled to launch in 2026.
The startup is led by Aaron Kemmer, formerly of Made in Space, and Maxime de Jongh, an engineer who has carefully stayed out of the limelight while co-developing expandable habitats like those currently attached to the International Space Station.
They're confident a breakout moment for these kinds of space structures is on the horizon, one that could ultimately capture a multi-billion-dollar market by positioning themselves as successors and radical improvers to designs that others have pursued for decades.
Max Space's expandable habitat promises to be bigger, stronger and more versatile than anything launched before — not to mention much cheaper and lighter than any solid machined structure. And, despite its balloon-like appearance, like its predecessors, it will be highly durable against the various hazards of space.
Image credit: Max Space
But can a startup really compete with major aerospace companies with decades of flight tradition and experience? De Jong doesn't seem worried about that.
“My mantra is never try anything you can do in advance,” he told me.
“…That's something that's always going to haunt me,” he added.
Transhub Legacy
1997 NASA concept art for an expandable transformer hub in space. Image credit: NASA
Expandable habitats have been around for a long time, but they were first used in the 1990s as part of NASA's Transhub project, which pioneered the basic approach.
Contrary to appearances, the Expandable is not just a big balloon. The visible outer layer is a thin layer to reflect light and dissipate heat, as in many spacecraft. The structure and strength is inside, where the “basket weaving” technique has been an established practice since the Transhub.
This method involves hand-stitching alternating straps of Kevlar or other high-strength materials that, when expanded, form a woven basket-like surface that distributes internal pressure evenly across thousands of intersections.
At least, that's the theory.
Before and after of the Sierra Nevada LIFE expandable living space expansion. Image courtesy of Sierra Nevada Corporation.
De Jong worked with Bigelow Aerospace through his company Thin Red Line Aerospace to develop and launch the basket weave construction, but from the start he questioned the predictability of so many stitches, overlaps and interactions, since even the slightest irregularity could lead to cascading failures, even if well below safety standards.
“I saw all these straps and, as a guy in the field, I thought, this is a cluster. As soon as there's too much or not enough pressure, I don't know what percentage of the load is going to be transferred in either direction,” he said. “I didn't see a solution for it.”
He quickly added that the people currently working on basketweave designs (primarily Sierra Nevada and Lockheed Martin) are highly competent and have clearly moved the technology forward 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 17 years later, and the BEAM habitat has been attached to the ISS since 2016.)
But mitigation is not the solution. While basketweave, with its tradition of flight and extensive testing, is an uncontested choice for scalable aircraft, it bothered de Jong, just as it always does for engineers, that there is a suboptimal design out there somewhere in the world. Surely there was a way to do this that was powerful, simple, and safe.
Myler and Bernoulli
Maxim de Jong working in the Thin Red Line space.
As is often the case, the solution came by pure chance around 20 years ago. It was a dark time for de Jong. At work, he had turned down a takeover offer from Bigelow and his company was in trouble. At home, he and his wife were “living on credit cards. We'd sold our car.” More importantly, his son was ill and in hospital.
“I was really tired of all the 'take care' balloons because my son wasn't getting any better,” he told me.
As he stared ominously at the helium-filled Mylar, something struck him: “Any object that has volume and can hold something is subjected to loads in two directions. But a child's Mylar balloon… has two discs and lots of wrinkles, so all the stress is concentrated in one axis. It's a mathematical anomaly!”
The shape of the balloon essentially changes the direction of the forces acting on it, so that the pressure actually only pulls it away from where the two halves connect.Could this principle be applied on a larger scale? De Jong quickly searched the literature for information on this phenomenon, and found that this structure had actually been recorded 330 years ago by French mathematician James Bernoulli.
Diagram from Bernoulli's 1694 book “Elastic Surfaces” showing, in principle, an isotonic body (helped by de Jong). Image courtesy of Bernoulli.
This would have been both gratifying and a little humiliating even if Bernoulli had not intended this intriguing anomaly as an orbital habitat.
“Humility will get you so far. Physicists and mathematicians have known all this since the 17th century. Bernoulli couldn't use a computer, he just wrote with ink on parchment!”, he told me. “I'm reasonably intelligent, but no one works with textiles. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. You have to be honest. You have to see what other people are doing. And you have to keep digging, digging, digging.”
By forming Bernoulli shapes (called isotonic bodies) out of cords or “tendons,” all of the problems with stretchable things are more or less solved naturally, de Jong explains.
“It's structurally deterministic, which means you just take a length of cord and the geometry is determined – the diameter, the height, the shape – everything. And once those are determined, the pressure is the PSI at the equator divided by the number of cords. And one cord doesn't affect the other cords. You know exactly how much strength each cord needs. It's all predictable,” he said.
An inflated prototype is suspended with a Thin Red Line employee inside. Image courtesy of Max Space
“It's surprisingly easy to make.”
The only force that matters is the tension on these cords (96 in the prototype, rated at 17,000 pounds each), pulling on anchors at either end of the form. As you can guess from suspension bridges and other high-tension structures, we know how to make this type of connection very strong. It's easy to add gaps for docking rings, windows, and other features.
The way the tendons deform can also be tailored to fit different shapes, such as cylindrical or the uneven interiors of lunar caves. (De Jong was very excited about this news – inflatables are a very suitable solution for lunar interior habitats.)
The pressurized structure is so reliable that it can be sheathed with flight-tested materials already used for insulation, radiation and micrometeorite blocking. Its design is similarly simple, as it is not load-bearing. But the whole thing compresses into a pancake just a few inches thick that can be folded up or wrapped around other payloads like a blanket.
The 20 cubic metres of living space has been reduced to a 2 cubic metre pancake shape, or “flat configuration”. Image courtesy of Max Space
“It took us, a team of five, six months to build the biggest inflatable anyone has ever made before,” de Jong said, but added that “the challenge of getting it right is incredibly complex,” praising the team's expertise.
What de Jong had achieved was to discover, or rediscover, a way to build a space enclosure that had the same structural strength as machined metal but used a fraction of the mass and volume, and he went to work immediately. But who would fly it?
Enter maximum space
The Thin Red Line has put many products into orbit before, but this new, scalable product faced a long and difficult battle. Spaceflight strongly favors established methods and technologies, creating a dilemma: you need to go to space to get the tradition of flight, and you need the tradition of flight to get to space.
In recent years, falling launch costs and game investors have helped break this cycle, but it's still not easy to achieve with launch vehicles.
De Jong had been working on Isotensoid for over a decade but feared he would never see it fly: He had frequently received acquisition offers, but wanted to keep his idea on track because “although I was honored, I didn't want to sell my soul to the dark side.”
That's where Aaron Kemmer comes in. His company, Made in Space, has been putting payloads on the International Space Station for years. He'd just sold his company, and he was thinking about the next big thing — literally.
“We quickly realized that to bring real commercialization to space (large factories, housing, laboratories, etc.), we needed much more volume. Expandable devices are the only comprehensive solution that can make this possible,” he explained. “And no one in the world knows more about space expandable devices than Maxim.”
Max Space prototype at MARS 2024. Image courtesy of Max Space
“NASA, defense, tourism, space manufacturing companies, companies that want to manufacture medicines in space, even entertainment companies, basically all of these things, it's very expensive to do anything in space,” Kemmer said. A lot of that cost is in launch, which is continually falling as supply doubles. Meanwhile, the volume accessible in space has only grown slightly for decades as demand has grown.
Thus was born Max Space, a startup formed specifically to commercialize this new approach, named both as a reference to the fact that there's more space in space and as a homage to de Jongh: Kemmer thought that after decades of operating in relative obscurity, de Jongh deserved a little more recognition (“that suits me,” he said).
The first mission will launch in 2026 aboard a SpaceX rideshare vehicle to provide proof-of-concept flight experience, one of the advantages that current extended spacecraft have over isotensoids.
“Let's go to LEO, inflate the biggest inflatable that's ever been sent into space, hang out there for a while and see what happens,” Kemmer said. The rocket will carry some small customer payloads, but those are secondary. Once the concept proves with this tiny rocket (which inflates from 2 cubic meters to 20 cubic meters, maybe the size of a bedroom), the real rocket will be much larger, as has already been demonstrated on the ground.
“Our first expansion modules will be similar in size to the current space station modules, in the range of tens to hundreds of cubic meters. Ultimately, we're aiming for thousands of cubic meters, which will be useful not only for the journey to orbit, but also for missions to the Moon and Mars,” Kemmer said.
Concept art of the Max Space Capsule on the Moon. Image courtesy of Max Space.
The two described various internal components that could be added or packaged later, including agriculture, living, manufacturing and research. If it's volume you need, Max Space is ready to deliver. Kemmer expects the market to explode (it's impossible to avoid that phrase) by the time they demonstrate in space, because by that time, big rockets and space habitation will be well advanced and the industry will start looking for next-generation solutions.
If so, Max Space has the answer for you.