Max Space reinvents expandable habitats with a 17th-century twist, launching in 2026 | TechCrunch

Working and even living in space has shifted from far-off fantasy to seemingly inevitable reality, but the question remains: what exactly 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.

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 that the breakout moment for this type of in-space structure is due to arrive any year now. By positioning themselves as a successor to — and fundamental improvement on — the decades-old designs being pursued by others, they can capture what may eventually be a multi-billion-dollar market.

Max Space’s expandable habitats promise to be larger, stronger, and more versatile than anything like them ever launched, not to mention cheaper and lighter by far than a solid, machined structure. And despite their balloon-like looks, they are, like their predecessors, quite resilient to the many and various perils of space.

But can a startup really take on major aerospace companies with decades of flight heritage and experience? De Jong doesn’t seem to be worried about that part.

“A mantra of mine is never try anything you know you can do ahead of time,” he told me.

“…Which comes back to bite me constantly,” he added.

Transhab legacy

Expandable habitats go back a long ways, but their first real 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 big balloons. The visible outer layer is, like with many spacecraft, 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.

In this method, straps of kevlar and other high-strength materials are lined up in alternating directions and manually stitched together, and upon expansion form a surface like a woven basket, with the internal pressure distributed evenly across all the thousands of intersections.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

De Jong, through his company Thin Red Line Aerospace, worked successfully with Bigelow Aerospace to develop and launch this basket-weave structure, but he had his doubts from the start about the predictability of so many stitches, overlaps, and interactions. A tiny irregularity could lead to a cascading failure even well below safety thresholds.

“I looked at all these straps, and as a field guy I was thinking, this is a cluster. As soon as you’re over or under pressure, you don’t know what percentage of the load is going to be transferred in one direction or another,” he said. “I never found a solution for it.”

He was quick to add that the people working on basket-weave designs today (primarily at Sierra Nevada and Lockheed Martin) are extremely competent and have clearly advanced the tech far beyond what it was in the early 2000s, when Bigelow’s pioneering expandable habitats were built and launched. (Genesis I and II are still in orbit today after 17 years, and the BEAM habitat has been attached to the ISS since 2016.)

But mitigation isn’t a solution. Although basket-weave, with its flight heritage and extensive testing, has remained unchallenged as the method of choice for expandables, the presence of a sub-optimal design somewhere in the world haunted De Jong, in the way such things always haunt engineers. Surely there was a way to do this that was strong, simple, and safe.

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: at work, having rebuffed acquisition attempts by Bigelow, his company was struggling. At home, he and his wife “were living off credit cards — we’d sold our car.” More importantly, his son was sick and in the hospital.

“I was getting really tired of the ‘get well’ balloons, because my son was not getting better,” he told me.

As he balefully contemplated the helium-filled Mylar, something about it struck him: “Every volume that you can put something in has load 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 shape taken by the balloon essentially redirects the forces acting on it so that pressure really only pulls in one direction: away from where the two halves connect. Could this principle be applicable at a larger scale? De Jong rushed to the literature to look up the phenomenon, only to find this structure had indeed been documented — 330 years ago, by the French mathematician James Bernoulli.

This was both gratifying and perhaps a little humiliating, even if Bernoulli had not intended this interesting anomaly for orbital habitation.

“Humility will get you so far. Physicists and mathematicians knew all this, from the 17th century. I mean, Bernoulli didn’t have access to this computer — just ink on parchment!” he told me. “I’m reasonably bright, but nobody works in fabrics; in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. You have to be honest, you have to look at what other people are doing, and you have to dig, dig, dig.”

By forming Bernoulli’s shape (called an isotensoid) out of cords, or “tendons,” every problem with expandables more or less solves itself, De Jong explains.

“It’s structurally determinant. That means if I just 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.

“It’s stupidly simple to make.”

All the important forces are simply tension on these cords (96 of them in the prototypes, each rated to 17,000 pounds), pulling on anchors at either end of the shape. And as you might guess from suspension bridges and other high-tension structures, we know how to make this type of connection very, very strong. Gaps for docking rings, windows, and other features are simple to add.

The way the tendons deform can also be adjusted to different shapes, like cylinders or even the uneven interiors of a Moon cave. (De Jong was very excited about that news — an inflatable is a highly suitable solution for a lunar interior habitat.)

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 simple. Yet the whole thing compresses to a pancake only a few inches thin, which can be folded up or wrapped around another payload like a blanket.

“The biggest inflatables anyone has made, and we did with a team of five people in six months,” De Jong said — though he added that “the challenges of its correct implementation are surprisingly complex” and credited that team’s expertise.

What De Jong had done is discover, or perhaps rediscover, a method for making an enclosure in space that had comparable structural strength to machined metal, but using only a tiny fraction of the mass and volume. And he lost no time getting to work on it. But who would fly it?

Enter Max Space

Thin Red Line has seen plenty of its creations go to orbit. But this new expandable faced a long, uphill battle. For spaceflight, established methods and technologies are strongly favored, leading to a catch-22: you need to go to space to get flight heritage, and you need flight heritage to go to space.

Falling launch costs and game investors have helped break this loop in recent years, but it’s still no simple thing to get manifested on a launch vehicle.

As De Jong worked on the isotensoid for more than a decade, he worried that he would never see it fly. Though he’d been fielding frequent acquisition offers — “flattering, but I didn’t want to sell my soul to the dark side” — he wanted to put his idea in orbit.

In came 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 — literally.

“I quickly realized that if we were ever going to bring real commercialization (large factories, housing, labs, etc.) to space, we needed a lot more volume. Expandables are the only comprehensive solution that allows this to be possible,” he explained. “And no one in the world knows space expandables better than Maxim.”

“NASA, defense, tourism, space manufacturing companies, companies wanting to do pharmaceuticals in space, even entertainment companies — basically for all of these, to do anything in space is very expensive,” Kemmer said. Much of that expense comes from launch, but that cost is constantly dropping as supply multiplies, while accessible volume in space has increased only marginally for decades as demand has risen.

Hence Max Space, a startup built specifically to commercialize the new approach — the name is both a reference to having more space in space, and a tribute to (Maxim) De Jong, whom Kemmer thought deserved a bit more recognition after working for decades in relative anonymity (“which suits me just fine,” he noted).

Their first mission will launch in 2026 aboard a SpaceX rideshare vehicle, and act as a proof of concept so they can get flight heritage, which is one advantage extant expandables have over isotensoids.

“We’ll go to LEO, inflate the largest inflatable to ever go to space, then let it stay up there for a while and see what happens,” Kemmer said. It will have some small customer payloads, but those are secondary. Once they prove out the concept with this small one — 2 cubic meters that expand to 20, which you might call bedroom-sized — the real thing will be much bigger, as already demonstrated on the surface.

“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 not only help us on the way to orbit but also on missions to the moon and Mars,” Kemmer said.

The two described a rich variety of internal components, any of which can be packed in or added later: farming, living, manufacturing, research — if what you need is volume, Max Space is ready to provide. Kemmer said he expects the market to blow up (it’s impossible to avoid the phrase) around the time they demonstrate in space, since by then heavy-lift vehicles and in-space habitation will be far enough along that the industry will begin asking after the next generation of solutions.

When they do, Max Space will be ready with their answer.