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Vast Space based in California he has big ambitions. The company aims to launch a commercial space station, the Haven-2, into low Earth orbit by 2028, which will allow astronauts to stay in space after the deactivation of space. International Space Station (ISS) in 2030. By doing so, it is trying to muscle of NASA they plan 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 the absence of gravity we can live for a year or more, and in conditions that are not easy. Perhaps, however, the lunar or Martian gravity is enough to live comfortably for a lifetime. The only way to know 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 the 49-year-old programmer and entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, the creator of the peer-to-peer networks eDonkey and Overnet, as well as the first and now defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox. Vast Space announced in mid-December a partnership with SpaceX to launch two missions to the ISS, which will be milestones in the company’s launch plan its first space station, Haven-1, later in 2025. The missions, still without official launch dates, will fall under the NASA astronaut private mission 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 advanced artificially mimicking gravity will take 10 to 20 years, as well as an amount of money that we don’t have right now,” Haot admitted. “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 a Dragon (SpaceX) in 2025. They will be on board Haven -1 for two weeks, then return safely, demonstrating to NASA our capability ahead of any competitor.”
Room for one more?
What Vast Space is trying to do, show its capabilities, is to participate in NASA Commercial destinations in low earth orbit (CLD), a project that the space agency inaugurated in 2021 with a grant of $ 415 million to support the development of private stations in low Earth orbit.
The money was initially allocated to three different projects: one from the aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman, which has since 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 surpass 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 return in the second half of 2026.
In doing this, Vast is borrowing from SpaceX’s playbook. Not only Vast Space attracted some of its employees and the design of equipment and vehicles by Elon Musk Company, also tries to replicate its approach to the market: to be ready before anyone else, having technologies and processes already qualified and validated in orbit. “We’re running late,” Haot says. “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 consumable resources for the crew’s personal living quarters, a laboratory, and a deployable communal table set next to a domed window of about a meter of height. On board, about 425 kilometers above Earth’s surface, the station will use Starlink laser links to communicate with satellites in low Earth orbit, technology that was first tested during the Polaris Dawn mission in the fall of 2024.
