Free Republic

What good is an amendment saying we have the right to bear arms if I can't go house to house firing buckshot into every inflatable Christmas minion I see? Look, I don't have to spend my evenings driving around the neighborhood in my 2003 Silverado, shooting high-powered ammunition into inflatable Grinches. I do it as a service to my community. I'm just an everyday, red-blooded American, trying to do his part to rid the world of these abominations. Putting up inflatables to decorate for Christmas is like celebrating your anniversary by kissing your sister. It's gross, and it doesn't...

Space entrepreneur Robert Bigelow has been making quiet inroads into the development of Earth orbiting inflatable modules. The privately built and financed habitable structures would be available for research, manufacturing, and other uses, including lodging for future space tourists. Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nevada is eying launch early next year of Genesis Pathfinder spacecraft – a shakeout of systems to be used on a full-scale inflatable space structure dubbed the Nautilus, and now referred to as the BA-330.

Castles of air? Photo: Zooey Braum Are we ready to live like modern nomads, with ultra-advanced homes that pack up and travel with us wherever we go? For towns that spring up and vanish when they are no longer needed, or spacecraft that could be any shape you wanted. Axel Thallemer certainly is. His big idea is to build real inflatable buildings that are as far removed from the blow-up jokey plastic world of the 1960s as you can imagine. And at Festo, where he is head of corporate design, they already have eight years of experience in building working...