Robert Bigelow

Robert Thomas Bigelow (born May 12, 1944) is an American businessman. He owns Budget Suites of America and is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.

Bigelow has provided financial support for investigations of UFOs and parapsychological topics, including the continuation of consciousness after death.

Bigelow grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, attended Highland Elementary School. about 70 miles (100 km) from where nuclear weapons tests were conducted at the Nevada National Security Site nuclear weapons tests, northwest of the city.

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.

From the late 1960s through the '90s, 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 he did sell before the 2008 financial crisis. In 2013, Bigelow reflected on this: "People just really wanted to throw money away, so that was lucky."

Bigelow owns Budget Suites of America, an extended-stay apartment chain founded in 1987. Its rooms are primarily suites featuring a full kitchen. Budget Suites owns three hotels in Phoenix, Arizona; five in Las Vegas, Nevada; ten in Dallas, Texas; and one in San Antonio, Texas.

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.

On February 4, 1965, he married Diane Mona Grammy (April 9, 1947 – February 19, 2020) of Camden, New Jersey.

They had two children together, Robert Michael "Bobby" Bigelow, and Rod Lee Bigelow. In 1992, Rod Lee Bigelow died by suicide, aged 24. In 2011, Robert Bigelow's grandson, Rod Lee Bigelow II, died by suicide, having suffered from drug addiction.