Robert Bigelow
| Robert Bigelow | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Robert T. Bigelow 1945 (age 71–72) |
| Residence | Las Vegas, Nevada, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Businessman |
Robert T. Bigelow (born 1945) is an American businessman. He owns the hotel chain Budget Suites of America and is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.
Bigelow grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, attended Highland Elementary School, and was first exposed to science through witnessing—from a distance—a number of the atomic tests conducted about 70 miles northwest of the city. Bigelow recounts that at age 12 he "decided that his future lay in space travel, despite his limitations [in mathematics, and] he resolved to choose a career that would make him rich enough that, one day, he could hire the scientific expertise required to launch his own space program. Until then, he would tell no one—not even his wife—about his ultimate goal".
He entered the University of Nevada, Reno in 1962 to study banking and real estate, and he graduated from Arizona State University in 1967.
After many years from the late 1960s through the 1990s developing commercial real estate hotels, motels and apartments, Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace in 1999
In his real estate career, Bigelow built approximately 15,000 units, and purchased another 8,000. For most of his career, "he held on to almost everything he bought, but ... eventually unload[ed] much of his housing stock in the boom years immediately before the 2008 crash". In 2013, Bigelow reflected on this: "People just really wanted to throw money away, ... So that was lucky."
Bigelow has indicated that he plans to spend up to US$500 million to develop the first commercial space station, the amount that NASA expended on a single space shuttle mission.
Bigelow Aerospace has launched two experimental space modules, Genesis I and Genesis II, and has plans for full-scale manned space habitats to be used as orbital hotels, research labs and factories. Bigelow's BEAM module was launched to the International Space Station on April 8, 2016, on the eighth SpaceX cargo resupply mission.
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