Robert Thomas Bigelow (born May 12, 1944) is an American businessman. He owns the hotel chain Budget Suites of America and is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace. In 2011, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $700 million. Bigelow has provided financial support for investigations of UFOs and parapsychological topics, including the continuation of consciousness after death. Early life and education Bigelow grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, attended Highland Elementary School, and was first exposed to science through a number of the nuclear weapons tests conducted about 70 miles northwest of the city. At age 12, Bigelow decided that his future lay in space travel. Despite his limitations in mathematics, he resolved to choose a career that would make him rich enough that, one day, he could hire the scientific expertise required to launch his own space program. He enrolled in the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1962 to study banking and real estate, and he graduated from Arizona State University in 1967. Career Real estate From the late 1960s through the 1990s, Bigelow developed commercial real estate hotels, motels and apartments. In his real estate career, Bigelow built approximately 15,000 units and purchased another 8,000. For most of his career, "he held on to almost everything he bought, but ... eventually unload much of his housing stock in the boom years immediately before the 2008 crash". In 2013, Bigelow reflected on this: "People just really wanted to throw money away, so that was lucky." Aerospace In 1999, Bigelow founded Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow had indicated he planned to spend up to US$500 million to develop the first commercial space station with a goal of the station costing 33% of the US$1.5 billion that NASA expended on a single Space Shuttle mission. Bigelow Aerospace has launched two experimental space modules, Genesis I in 2006 and Genesis II in 2007, and had planned for full-scale space habitats to be used as orbital hotels, research labs and factories. In 2013, Bigelow indicated that the reason he went into the commercial real estate business was to obtain the requisite resources to be able to fund a team developing space destinations. In October 2017, Bigelow announced that he planned to put an inflatable "space hotel" into orbit by 2022. The plan is part of partnership with United Launch Alliance, and the project is estimated to cost US$2.3 billion in total. The cost of a