We made a seven inch diameter air beam test article. Seven inch beams will be used for the the High Beam mission and a fifty foot diameter Dark Sky Station to be launched next summer. Before committing all that fabric on a 50 foot beam we made a eight foot long seven inch diameter beam. It was mainly to testing the fitting of the inner liner and end caps. All the prior air beams were fourteen inches in diameter.
Tonight we pressurized the beam. It held fine at 2 psi, the operating pressure, and burst at 5.1 psi. My ears are still ringing…
The future of the Dark Sky Station gets brighter with every experimental operational test. Some day, we will have to call it the Enlightened Sky Station. Or, is that title a bit inflated?