The company hitched its first ride to the high frontier with SpaceX last Friday. And today it announced a partnership with celestial transportation company United Launch Alliance to develop and launch habitable, inflatable, full-on space stations starting in 2020.

The move represents new business for ULA, and a strategic shift. The company has recently come under congressional fire for using Russian-made engines in the Atlas V rockets that'll eventually take the Bigelow B330 habitat to orbit. And Elon Musk's SpaceX, which can get stuff to space for many millions of dollars less, recently won an Air Force contract that would have been up ULA's alley (although ULA did not bid). ULA, on the flip side, does have an A+, 100-percent launch success rate, which SpaceX does not. Still, with competitors on the rise, ULA seems to hope that relationships outside the old guard—and cost-cutting measures like a 375-person "reduction in force" they announced on Friday—will help their company stay in the space game.

That game, said founder Robert Bigelow at a press conference Monday afternoon, is changing, moving from governmental dominance to private partnerships like this one. "For the first time, stations and transportation systems will be available to serve as an open resource and not mainly the purview of nations," he said. "NASA is evolving from owning everything to becoming a commercial customer and a tenant," he said.

Bigelow imagines expandable habitats like the B330, which can be linked together, will become scientific research facilities, habitats on other planets and satellites, and tourist destinations. "We would love to see Disney have a Disney space station," he said. "Wouldn't that be cool?"