Vast Space based in California has big ambitions. The company aims to launch a commercial space station, the Haven-2, into low Earth orbit by 2028, which would allow astronauts to remain in space after the decommissioning of the. International Space Station (ISS) in 2030. In doing so, it tries to muscle up the NASA plans to develop commercial low-orbit space stations with partner organizations—but most ambitious of all are Vast Space’s goals for what it will eventually put into space: a station that has its own artificial gravity.
“We know that in weightlessness we can live for a year, and in conditions that are not easy. Perhaps, however, lunar or Martian gravity is enough to live comfortably for a lifetime. The only way to find out is to build stations with artificial gravity, which is our long-term goal,” says Max Haot, CEO of Vast.
Vast Space was founded in 2021 by 49-year-old developer and businessman Jed McCaleb, the creator of the peer-to-peer networks eDonkey and Overnet, as well as the early and now defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox. Vast Space announced in mid-December a partnership with SpaceX launch two missions to the ISS, which will be milestones in the company’s plan to launch its first space station, Haven-1, later in 2025. The missions, still without official launch dates, will be part of NASA’s private astronaut missions program, through which the space agency wants to promote the development of a space economy in low Earth orbit.
For Vast, this is part of a long-term business strategy. “Building an outpost that artificially mimics gravity will take 10 to 20 years, and also an amount of money that we don’t have right now,” Haot admits. “However, to win the most important contract in the space station market, which is the replacement of ISS, with the resources of our founder, we will launch four people on [SpaceX] Dragon in 2025. They will remain on Haven-1 for two weeks, then return safely, proving to NASA our capability ahead of any competitor.”
Room for One More?
What Vast Space is trying to do, by showing its capabilities, is to participate in NASA Commercial Targets in Low Earth Orbit (CLD) program, a project the space agency inaugurated in 2021 with a $415 million grant to support the development of private low-Earth orbit stations.
The money was initially assigned to three different projects: one from aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman, which later left the program; a joint venture called Starlab; and Orbital Reef, from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Vast does not have a contract with the US space agency, but it aims to outdo its competitors by showing NASA that it can put a space station in space before these others. The agency will choose the station of the project to support in the second half of 2026.
In doing so, Vast is borrowing from SpaceX’s playbook. Not only did Vast Space pull some of its employees and the design of equipment and vehicles out Elon Musk’s company, it also tries to reproduce its approach to market: to be ready before anyone else, having technologies and processes already qualified and validated in orbit. “We’re behind,” says Haot. “What can we do to win? Our answer, in the second half of 2025, will be the launch of Haven-1.”
Haven-1 will have a habitable volume of 45 cubic meters, a docking port, a corridor with consumables for the crew’s personal quarters, a laboratory, and a deployable communal table set next to a domed window about a meter high. On board, about 425 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, the station will use Starlink laser links to communicate with satellites in low Earth orbit, a technology that was first tested during the Polaris Dawn mission in the fall of 2024.
