Planning for the planet's first private space station is moving more quickly than expected. Bigelow Aerospace founder Robert Bigelow announced that the firm was moving up its schedule to orbit its first manned inflatable module—part of a larger plan for a hotel in space.

No timetable was given for launch of the habitable spacecraft, called Sundancer, but the guess is that it could come before or during 2010. With successful launches of both its Genesis I and Genesis II modules, the company decided to skip a third planned test—this one a larger module called "Galaxy"—and proceed directly to the manned Sundancer program. Original plans called for Sundancer to be a central part of the world's first orbiting privately-owned, commercial human space habitat in 2012.

"With this decision made, the future of entrepreneurial, private sector-driven space habitats and complexes could be arriving much earlier than previously anticipated," Bigelow said in a press release issued on August 13. "While recognizing the inherent difficult, all of us a BA are eager to begin work on an actual human spaceflight program, which is the reason that I and others began this effort in the first place."