Vast attempting to leapfrog industry with the first commercial space station

Image: Vast

A company you probably have never heard of before, Vast, is looking to be the first company to launch and operate a private space station in low Earth orbit. The company announced Wednesday plans to leapfrog everyone else in the field in two years.

Who is Vast?

Founded in 2021 by Jed McCaleb, who made his billions in cryptocurrency, Vast aims to make it possible for humanity to live in space. The company is a relatively new one, just like the founder’s funding source, but it seems to have made a name for itself with a partnership with SpaceX.

The company also acquired Launcher earlier this year and merged its staff to continue moving towards its space station goal. Launcher brought over its space tug technology that it will use to develop the system needed for a successful space station. Multiple of these tugs, called Orbiter, are expected to be launched on SpaceX rideshare missions later this year.

Its first space station, Haven-1, will fit inside a Falcon 9 payload and is expected to launch no earlier than August 2025. That launch will be followed shortly by Vast-1, a crewed flight on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft that will dock with Haven-1, making the crew the first to occupy a commercial space station.

Haven-1 can support a crew of four for up to 30 days. Much shorter than the continuous crew rotations of the International Space Station but enough to hopefully pique commercial interest.

Haven-1 inside a Falcon 9 payload fairing. Image: Vast

Future plans for Vast are building a larger “Starship-Class” space station module that will be turned into “Spinning Stick Stations.” These early space stations will serve as a test bed for artificial gravity for the larger long-term station that could be constructed anywhere in the solar system. This “Proliferated Station Fleet” will allow humanity to live in space and supposedly move throughout the solar system.

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Will Vast be the first commercial space station?

If everything goes to Vast’s plan, the company will have an operational free-floating commercial space station by the end of 2025. That is years before any of NASA’s picks come close to coming online, and about the same time, Axiom Space will launch a module to the ISS.

This would be an impressive timeline; however, everything eventually in the space industry will slip to the right. Axiom has already begun building hardware for its space station module, and we have no idea how far along Vast is in constructing its station. It actually sounds like Vast is still developing the technology it needs to complete its goals.

Now Axiom’s station and Vast’s Haven-1 are very different kinds of space stations. Axiom is connecting to the ISS and has had to go through reviews with NASA, so there is a lot more work that needs to be done. But, on the other hand, Vast seems to be working on modules that can be constructed quickly and cheaply, so we could see them go from nothing to a flight article in months rather than years.

It is exciting to see the commercial space station sector heat up. However, between Axiom, NASA’s LEO destination contenders, and now Vast, the concern of if there will be a replacement for the ISS is a much smaller mystery than before.