LIFE Habitat | Sierra Space Successfully Completes Month Long Creep Test

Sierra Space has successfully performed a month-long Accelerated Systematic Creep (ASC) test on LIFE – the first milestone in its 2023 testing campaign. Engineers loaded a one-third-scale version of the inflatable habitat with a sustained amount of pressure over an extended period until it failed. The campaign demonstrated that the LIFE habitat pressure shell design has a predicted life of far greater than 60 years – or 525,600 hours – based on Sierra Space’s 15-year on-orbit life requirement and the applied 4x safety factor. The next series of one-third-scale LIFE certification tests will focus on inserting hard structures into the pressure shell and correlating the results to previous tests. Sierra Space anticipates moving toward full-scale LIFE habitat tests later this year. Thanks to a recently signed Space Act Agreement with NASA, Sierra Space will expand its collaborative environment with Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), in Huntsville, Ala., to continue critical work on