Robert T Bigelow

Longtime entrepreneur Robert T. Bigelow is the Founder and President of Bigelow Aerospace, LLC, and has personally provided all financial support for the company, totaling over $350 million to date. In addition, Mr. Bigelow provides the daily strategic leadership at Bigelow Aerospace in its design, development, and testing of expandable habitat architectures, and serves as the program manager of the B330 spacecraft – Bigelow Aerospace’s main habitation system for low Earth orbit and beyond low Earth orbit destinations. Robert Bigelow is an experienced general contractor, designer, developer, financier, buyer and manager of many large real estate projects in the U.S. Over the last seventeen years, Mr. Bigelow has earned over twenty patents, launched three prototype spacecraft, partnered with NASA on several contracts, built the necessary facilities to design and fabricate expandable habitat technology, and has advocated for a sustainable commercial space economy. Bigelow first chose a career in real estate because it was how his father, Robert L. Bigelow, a successful broker, made his living. In 1962 he enrolled at the University of Reno to study banking and real estate, but his father didn’t live to see him graduate: At the age of 41, he was killed in a light plane crash in California. His son finally graduated from Arizona State University in 1967 and spent nine months back in Las Vegas trying to make it as a real estate agent, without much success. Then, at 20, with a new wife and a baby to support, Bigelow borrowed $20,000 from a hard money lender. He watched his $20,000 dwindle until, with $14,000 left, in late 1968, he found a house with four apartments behind it. He did the cleaning and painting himself, and rented the units out on weekly terms. For the next 30 years, he kept buying and building in other sprawling Southwestern towns: Phoenix, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio. The privately held Budget Suites chain, which put a recognizable brand on his expanding inventory of short-term-let apartments, put Bigelow on the path to billionaire status. In 1996, Bigelow bought a 480-acre ranch in Utah from a family who had reported experiencing a frightening range of paranormal incidents, including cattle mutilations, unexplained lights in the sky, and objects that moved on their own. Bigelow now maintains this as what he calls a “living laboratory,” with a perimeter patrolled around the clock by armed guards. In 1997, Bigelow provided $3.7 million to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas to start a Consciousness Studies program with the aim, he says, of establishing “whether there is a survival of your consciousness beyond your bodily death.” Today, the FAA directs all new reports of UFO sightings to another Bigelow-funded organization, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, of which he is operating manager. Bigelow is unequivocal about the evidence he’s accumulated over the years: He’s convinced of the existence of extraterrestrial life. If the company fulfills its current plans, Bigelow Aerospace will be managing its first property on the moon within a decade.