On Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:50:29 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Jorge
R. Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

Rand Simberg wrote:

Prototype or not, Genesis II is a real, operational spacecraft, and
it's been operating for many months now.

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/genesis_II/

All it lacks, AFAIK, is ECLSS. Add that, scale it up, and you have a
space habitat. Add propulsion, and it can co-orbit with ISS. Bigelow
has already issued a $23M contract for that to Aerojet.

Is that all? ECLSS and propulsion? Whew, I was beginning to think they
still had difficult work ahead. "If we had some eggs, we could have ham
and eggs, if we had some ham."

It doesn't need main propulsion, just RCS. You might even be able to
do the job with cold gas. Or hire someone else for an occasional
reboost.

Who are they contracting for the ECLSS? I'm assuming that since they
were smart enough to contract the propulsion, they wouldn't be fool
enough to try to do the ECLSS themselves. But I could be wrong.

I don't know, but I would think that Paragon could whomp something up
for them at a reasonable cost.