You can drive a nail into a football and it doesn't just pop. The shell encompassing Transhab would have three bladders, in fact, for redundancy. Outside these thin-film bladders would be Kevlar webbing and then sheets of ceramic fabric, each separated by 3 inches of foam. It's this ceramic, called Nextel, that would protect against micrometeoroids and other orbital clutter zooming by at tens of thousands mph. Even skeptics were impressed.
Any pressure vessel is truly a balloon.
Just because it's made out of aluminum you still get the same pressure stresses. If fired at the reinforced aluminum plates intended for the bulk of the international space station, the balls would penetrate the skin, de la Fuente says. Unfortunately, NASA cannot use the ultrathick Transhab padding on the conventional aluminum modules that will make up the rest of the international space station, de la Fuente says. That's the beauty of Transhab, de la Fuente says. So more of it can soar.