ILC Dover has developed and manufactured a variety of inflatable habitats, air-locks and shelters for use in earth orbit and lunar / planetary exploration. We have decades of experience in the design and manufacture of deployable habitats and shelters for a variety of applications. Our engineers & technicians have built upon Wernher von Braun's vision of inflatable space habitats, the work conducted by NASA in the 1960's, and our own work in space suits and high strength inflatable structures, to create deployable habitats for space exploration.
ILC has supported numerous studies of deployable space habitats for government partners since the 1980's. We have leveraged structural designs from terrestrial webbing based restraint structures such as high pressure torpedo recovery floats and hyperbaric chambers into what is the state of the art in expandable space habitats. The advantage of deployable systems includes structural mass and packing volume for transportation - the same metrics which have dictated the use of deployable systems since the dawn of exploration.
ILC has proven systems & processes that ensure the level of quality, reliability & safety to meet all spaceflight requirements. We perform the design & systems engineering, manufacture and test on site or at remote locations. We routinely apply our materials expertise in textiles, films, insulation and protective layers to create robust human-rated systems. We also create and employ new technologies to enhance performance, such as self-healing bladders, flexible structural health monitoring systems, and embedded sensors.
Our manufacturing capabilities are wide ranging and proven in flight programs.
Transhab
X-Hab
InFlex Hab
Toroidal Hab
Antarctic Hab
Livermore Hab
Minimal Functional Hab
Lunar Hab
Terrestrial Habitats
Single Occupant
