Vast Space is a space startup based in Long Beach, California. They just signed a contract with SpaceX to launch the first commercial space station as soon as 2025. They intend to crew it immediately after it attains a stable Earth orbit. Joseph McCaleb is the founder of Vast. He said, “It’s a super aggressive schedule. But we have a clear path for how we’re going to get there.”
The International Space Station (ISS) has served as NASA’s space research laboratory for more than twenty years. It has enabled groundbreaking scientific research that has advanced our understanding of space and improved our life on Earth.
NASA intends to deorbit the aging ISS in 2031 and has no plans to replace it. The agency intends to lease space on one or more commercial space stations owned by private companies. That plan depends on some company or group of companies actually sending a commercial space station into Earth orbit. Every space station that has been launched to date has been sent into space by a governmental agency.
Vast has now announced its plans to be the owner/operator of the first commercial space station. Its Haven-1 space station will be launched as soon as 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The next-soonest planned launch of a commercial space station is scheduled in late 2025. Axiom Space is planning on launching the first module of its Axiom Station.
Four companies, including Axiom, have already received funding from NASA to develop private space stations. Vast is not one of the funded four companies. Getting its station into orbit first could give it a serious advantage over NASA’s existing partners when securing contracts from other space companies. McCaleb said, “We see NASA as our biggest opportunity, as our largest customer. We’re not going to send you renders or prototypes in a warehouse. We have flight hardware.”
In addition to deploying the Haven-1 space station, SpaceX has also been contracted to send a Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying four astronauts to dock with the Vast’s space station soon after it reaches orbit. The Dragon will remain docked with the Haven-1 for as many as thirty days while the crew enjoys their time in orbit. The Haven-1 is twelve feet wide and thirty feet long. It is extra “cozy” compared to the ISS which is three hundred and fifty-six feet long.
Vast intends to sell tickets aboard that first flight to space agency astronauts or private citizens for scientific or philanthropic reasons. The cost of the tickets has not been announced. Anyone who is interested can apply on Vast’s website.
Vast’s long term goal is to deploy a three hundred and twenty-eight-foot-long commercial space station in 2030s. This will give NASA access to a space station closer in size to the ISS. Vast also has an ambitious plan to mimic the effects of gravity on the large space station by spinning it. The gravitational pull is expected to be only seventeen percent as strong as Earth’s. However, no one has ever produced any simulated gravity on a space station before. If Vast’s plan works, the artificial gravity on its big space station might be sufficient to mitigate many of the health issues caused by living in microgravity.