Vast and SpaceX are heating up the growing commercial space station race

Besides landing astronauts on the lunar surface in a few years, NASA is faced with the problem of how to replace the International Space Station once it reaches the end of its operational life around 2030. Toward that end, the space agency has signed funded Space Act Agreements with three companies, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Voyager Space, to start design work on commercial space stations. NASA has made an agreement with a fourth company, Axiom Space, to install commercial modules on the ISS as a precursor to its own orbiting space facility.

But now a fifth company, called Vast, has stolen a march on its competitors and has signed an agreement with SpaceX to launch a single-module commercial space station by August 2025, according to Space News. Vast is getting no direct help from NASA.

Space News reports: “The module, as currently designed, is 10.1 meters long and 3.8 meters in diameter, sized to fit inside a standard Falcon 9 payload fairing. The 14-ton module will provide 70 cubic meters of pressurized volume and 15 kilowatts of power. The module has a docking port at one end and a large window at the other.”

The Vast commercial space station, called Haven-1, resembles a concept developed by the United States Air Force called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). The MOL would have been launched on a Titan-IIIC rocket with a modified Gemini space capsule attached to it. The MOL would have been situated in a polar orbit with two Air Force astronauts who would conduct experiments and real-time reconnaissance of the Earth’s surface. President Richard Nixon canceled the program because NASA was developing its own space station called Skylab and robotic recon satellites had advanced enough to make MOL obsolete. Most of the MOL astronauts transferred to NASA and eventually flew on the space shuttle.

Vast plans to launch Haven-1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Then four astronauts would launch on board a Dragon spacecraft, dock with the Haven-1 and then spend 30 days conducting experiments or engaging in space manufacturing. Haven-1 is designed for four missions consisting of paying customers.

Haven-1 is simply the practice run for Vast’s main project to take place in the 2030s. The company intends to build a much larger space station consisting of modules launched by the SpaceX Starship. The large space station will be 100 meters long, consisting of modules seven meters in diameter. It will be capable of sustaining 40 people and will spin to create artificial gravity.

Vast’s strategy, compared to those of its competitors, is splendid in its simplicity. Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, Voyager Space and Axiom want to build multimodule commercial space stations from the very start. The Russians took 10 years, from 1986 to 1996, to fully deploy and assemble the Mir space station. The International Space Station began its assembly in 1998 and, even though the orbiting laboratory was officially completed in 2011, it is still very much a work in progress. The Chinese Tiangong started assemblage in 2021 and currently consists of three modules with more on the way.

History suggests assembling a multimodule commercial space station could take years, Of course, versatile launch vehicles, unavailable when the ISS was being constructed, such as the Falcon 9, could shorten that time.

Vast’s long-term plans constitute yet another reason that SpaceX Starship’s development, currently threatened by environmental litigation, should proceed with due speed. SpaceX’s hiring of Kathy Lueders, the former NASA engineer who was instrumental in bringing the Crew Dragon to operational status, is a welcome development in the effort to make the Starship the launch vehicle of the future.

Vast has much to do if it wants to have a commercial space station in orbit in two years. The launch date may slip. However, when and if the company launches Haven-1 and puts a crew on board, a commercial space station revolution will have started similar to the commercial space launch revolution ushered in by SpaceX with the first successful launch of the Falcon 1 in September 2008.

NASA hopes that, by the time the ISS reaches the end of its operational life, one or more commercial space stations will be in orbit, accepting paying customers and doing good science and technology development. By that time, the space agency also hopes to have astronauts on the moon.

Exciting times are ahead for the expansion of human civilization into space.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled, “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues.