Working and living in space has shifted from far-off fantasy to seemingly inevitable reality. However, the question remains: what will the next generation of space habitation look like? For Max Space, the answer is clear and has been for decades—centuries, even. A new generation of expandable habitats could offer both safety and enough room to stretch your legs, and the first one is going up in 2026.
Leadership and Vision
The startup is led by Aaron Kemmer, formerly of Made in Space, and Maxim de Jong, an engineer who has studiously avoided the limelight despite being the co-creator of expandable habitats like the one currently attached to the International Space Station. They believe the breakout moment for this type of in-space structure will arrive any year. By positioning themselves as a successor to—and fundamental improvement on—the decades-old designs pursued by others, they can capture what may eventually be a multi-billion-dollar market.
Space Advanced Expandable Habitats
Max Space’s expandable habitats promise to be larger, stronger, and more versatile than anything like them ever launched. They are also cheaper and lighter by far than a solid, machined structure. And despite their balloon-like looks, they are, like their predecessors, quite resilient to space’s many and various perils.
Transhab Legacy
Space Origins of Expandable Habitats
Expandable habitats go back a long way, but their first actual use was in the TransHab project at NASA in the 1990s, where the fundamental approach was developed. Contrary to their appearance, expandables aren’t just giant balloons. Like with many spacecraft, the visible outer layer is just a thin one to reflect light and dissipate heat. The structure and strength lie inside, and since TransHab, the established convention has been the “basket weave” technique.
Basket Weave Technique
In this method, straps of Kevlar and other high-strength materials are lined up in alternating directions and manually stitched together. Upon expansion, they form a surface like a woven basket, with the internal pressure distributed evenly across all the thousands of intersections.
Challenges and Innovations
Through his company, Thin Red Line Aerospace, De Jong worked successfully with Bigelow Aerospace to develop and launch this basket-weave structure. Still, he had doubts about the predictability of so many stitches, overlaps, and interactions. A tiny irregularity could lead to a cascading failure even well below safety thresholds.
Discovering a New Approach
Mylar and Bernoulli
The solution came, as these things so often do, quite serendipitously, about 20 years ago. It was a dark time for De Jong. Something struck him as he balefully contemplated a helium-filled Mylar balloon: “Every volume you can put something in has loaded in two directions. A kid’s Mylar balloon, though… there are two discs and all these wrinkles—all the stress is on one axis. This is a mathematical anomaly!”
The Isotensoid Shape
The balloon’s shape essentially redirects the forces acting on it so that pressure really only pulls in one direction: away from where the two halves connect. De Jong rushed to the literature to look up the phenomenon, only to find that this structure had indeed been documented 330 years ago by the French mathematician James Bernoulli.
Max Space’s Breakthrough
Space Structural Determinants
By forming Bernoulli’s shape (called an isoprenoid) out of cords, or “tendons,” every problem with expandables more or less solves itself. “It’s structurally determinant. That means if I take a cord of a certain length, that will define all the geometry: the diameter, the height, the shape—and once you have those, the pressure is the PSI at the equator, divided by the number of cords. And one cord doesn’t affect the others. You know exactly how strong one cord needs to be; everything is predictable,” he said.
Simplified Design and Implementation
All the essential forces are tension on these cords (96 in the prototypes, each rated at 17,000 pounds), pulling on anchors at either end of the shape. With the pressurized structure so reliable, it can be skinned with flight-tested materials already used to insulate, block radiation and micrometeoroids, and so on; since they aren’t load-bearing, that part of the design is similarly straightforward. Yet the whole thing compresses to a pancake only a few inches thin, which can be folded or wrapped around another payload like a blanket.
Launching in 2026
Enter Max Space
Thin Red Line has seen plenty of its creations go to orbit. But this new expandable faced a long, uphill battle. Established methods and technologies are strongly favored for spaceflight, leading to a catch-22: You need to go to space to get flight heritage, and you need flight heritage to go to space.
Collaboration and Market Potential
As De Jong worked on the solenoid for over a decade, he worried he would never see it fly. Enter Aaron Kemmer, whose company Made In Space had been putting payloads in the International Space Station for years. Having just sold, he was thinking about the next big thing. Hence, Max Space was explicitly built as a startup to commercialize the new approach. Their first mission will launch 2026 aboard a SpaceX rideshare vehicle and act as a proof of concept so they can get flight heritage, one advantage extant expandables have over isoprenoids.
Space Future Expansion and Applications
“Our first expandable module will be similar in size to current space station modules, ranging in the tens to hundreds of cubic meters. Eventually, we aim for thousands of cubic meters. This will help us on the way to orbit and on missions to the moon and Mars,” Kemmer said. Max Space is ready to provide various internal components, including farming, living, manufacturing, and research spaces. Kemmer expects the market to expand significantly around the time they demonstrate in space, as the industry will begin asking for the next generation of solutions.
