TransHab on ISS would have been useful

One of a series of posts on the NasaSpaceflight.com forums, that eventually got me a lifetime ban there. I could probably just create another account to login to that site, but I refuse. The engineers in the aerospace industry are too damned touchy, and I can't handle talking to them.  Which is probably just as well, since they're really isn't any value for them in talking to me either. 

I believe that there is a certain mindset in NASA, probably rooted in the minds of the large number of ex- and current military minds that work there, that anything that even vaguely smacks of 'luxury' or 'comfort' is somehow undesirable. Yes, I certainly agree that Transhab on the station is a 'nice-to-have' rather than a necessity, but I also think that it is a design with a certain audacity that would capture the public's imagination much more than any of the current tin cans. And we would be a lot further along to saying we understand how a lunar or martian habitat would work in practical terms, if we had gone ahead with the Transhab module on ISS. Of course it was Congress and not NASA that made that decision. But I suspect that NASA at the time also didn't fight very hard for it.

Because, as I mentioned above, it smacks of orbital luxury, which just doesn't sit right with the 'tough-it-out' military personnel in the industry. Bigelow did a great service to humanity to launch test units on their own dime, if for no other reason that they took a 'gee-wiz, sci-fi' technology and turned it into a real possibility, in the same way that Deep Space 1 suddenly turned ion propulsion into a viable alternative for hard-number, hard reality missions. If the U.S. human launch gap of 5 years materializes, and the Obama administration is looking for a way to extend the shuttle's life into that gap, I see few better candidates than adding a Bigelow module to ISS. (Yes, Jim, I realize there would be power and logistics issues. But if we're talking going to Congress to change the shuttle manifest, then at least theoretically, additional funding is possible to cover such changes to the facility.) Heck, fill the thing with a hydroponics lab and test another important technology.

Cutaway of the original TransHab module concept - (Image from Wikipedia, originally sourced to NASA)