Astrotech

Before 2009, Astrotech Corporation was known as SPACEHAB and headquartered in Houston, Texas. SPACEHAB was founded in 1984 with the goal of designing and building an artificial module within the payload bay of the space shuttle to transport tourists into space. NASA and SPACEHAB revised this original concept, agreeing instead to design and build a pressurized "Space Habitat" module capable of transporting supplies and experiments to low Earth orbit.In July 1993, SPACEHAB’s first module flew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The SPACEHAB modules were flown on more than 20 shuttle missions, conducting numerous experiments and delivering over 150,000 pounds of vital supplies and equipment to MIR and the International Space Station (ISS). SPACEHAB provided all aspects of “cargo management,” including development, design, construction, verification, integration, certification, transportation, operation, monitoring, and decommissioning of both pressurized and unpressurized flight hardware, as well as ground support equipment (GSE).