Would you take a trip to an inflatable space station?

Some of the richest people in the world are looking to space to make their mark but one unassuming American hopes to make his name with the first inflatable space hotel, reports Steven Cutts

William Gerstenmaier and Jason Crusan take a closer look at Bigelow’s Expandable Activity Module (Nasa)

These days, every self-made billionaire on the planet seems desperate to make their presence felt. Bill Gates – who made his money in software – has now spent an astonishing sum of money trying to wipe out Polio. In sharp contrast, the likes of Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Richard Branson (Virgin) have tried to carve a niche for themselves in the world of private spaceflight.

If any of these pastimes have a precedent then it’s probably the late great Howard Hughes, who inherited a reasonably large fortune from his father and went on to gain prominence in such wildly different fields as sex, aerospace and Hollywood. In contrast to his later day rivals, Hughes liked to direct his own movies and sit at the controls to his own aircraft, flying the thing in person.

This kind of behaviour can be difficult to understand and it’s a fair bet that at least one of the driving forces behind it is the desire to draw attention to yourself and, in that sense, the man who has been least successful in this game is the little known figure of Robert Bigelow, a moustached, unassuming American who made his money in the entirely unglamorous world of budget hotels and decided – quite late in life – to build the first hotel in outer space.