A few days ago a small spacecraft was lofted into orbit from Florida. An unglamorous-looking object about the size of a washing machine, it carries grand ambitions.
The Californian start-up behind it, Vast, wants to build the first commercial space station and aims to launch it as soon as next year. Success would signal a new era in spaceflight, one where nation states no longer collaborate to maintain a human presence above the planet.
The International Space Station (ISS), a 420-tonne symbol of post-Cold-War co-operation that has hosted crews continuously for a quarter of a century, is nearing retirement. The plan is to crash it into the Pacific around 2030, creating a vacancy in low-Earth orbit that a host of firms are battling to fill.
Vast, which has 1,000 staff and is backed by Jed McCaleb, a cryptocurrency billionaire, is part of the race to build a successor.
The Haven-1 space station by Vast
The spacecraft it launched this week, Haven Demo, carries no pressurised cabin and no life-support system. Instead it is packed with the electronics and machinery the company plans to rely on for its future stations: propulsion hardware, batteries and chargers, flight computers and navigation software.
The plan, says Max Haot, Vast’s chief executive, is to proceed at pace. “You build the system, you troubleshoot, you upgrade,” he said.
If all goes well, the spacecraft now circling Earth will validate the ground control systems needed for Haven-1, Vast’s first crewed module — 45 cubic metres of living space, enough for four astronauts with dedicated sleeping berths and a laboratory — which Haot says could be launched next year.
After that will be Haven-2, a slightly larger module planned for 2028. By latching a Haven module every six months and latching nine of them together, Vast hopes to have a 500 cubic metre habitat — about as much space as two double-decker buses, enough for nine people — by 2032.
The Haven-2 is planned to be operational within seven years
Eventually, it wants to build stations with artificial gravity, created by spinning modules to produce an Earth-like pull. “Right now, there is no market,” Haot concedes. “Nasa doesn’t want it.” But both Haven Demo and, later, Haven-1 will attempt brief spins.
The urgency stems from the looming risk of an “ISS gap”, a hiatus where the West has no orbital outpost, while the Chinese continue to operate their Tiangong space station.
Assembled in the late 1990s at a cost of about $150 billion, the ISS was a symbol of scientific ambition and geopolitical restraint. American, European, Russian and Japanese astronauts bolted together modules even as their governments bickered below. Its descent will close a chapter not only in engineering but in international politics.
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Yet Haot insists commercialisation will not end co-operation. “Quite the opposite,” he said. “We cannot be profitable without working with Europe, with JAXA [Japan’s space agency], and with all the emerging nations that are investing in human spaceflight.” The ISS was limited to a handful of partners. He expects its successors to be more cosmopolitan.
In the new era, Nasa plans to rent real estate in space rather than build it. Through its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations programme, it will choose a space station supplier, possibly next year.
Axiom Space, which already has a Nasa contract to attach modules to the ISS, and Starlab, a rival venture backed by Voyager Space and Airbus, are among Vast’s rivals. Jeff Bezos is in the mix, too; his company Blue Origin is part of Orbital Reef, an effort to create a “mixed-use business park” for research, industry, tourism and space habitation.
The Haven-1 space station will include a laboratory
But why keep humans in orbit at all? Haot cites two reasons. The first is exploration. He bristles at the argument, heard in environmental debates, that humanity must learn to live more modestly, with fewer people, lower consumption and slower growth. In his view, we should strive to multiply and prosper.
Vast’s billionaire backer shares the same expansive outlook. Humanity, McCaleb has argued, needs room to grow: “People need a frontier, otherwise things start to feel very zero-sum.”
Haot believes space stations will provide technology test beds and monitoring posts where the long-term effects of space on human health can be tracked.
How a common area could look on the Haven-1 space station
NOT KNOWN, CLEAR WITH PICTURE DESK
The second rationale involves science and, eventually, profits. Microgravity offers quirks that laboratories on Earth can not reproduce. Protein crystals grow larger and purer, potentially aiding in drug design. Stem-cell organoids — miniature replicas of human organs that could possibly be used to patch up faulty hearts and kidneys — appear to develop more quickly. “There is no use case yet where you can produce in space a product that, when you sell it on Earth, generates more revenue than the mission,” Haot ssays. “But you need to start somewhere.”
What, then, of the complaint that human spaceflight is a billionaire’s indulgence? McCaleb is said to be pumping a billion dollars into Vast. Couldn’t it be better spent on Earth?
Haot thinks the criticism misjudges the sums involved. Today’s investment in human spaceflight is a tiny fraction of the Apollo era, when Nasa briefly consumed more than 4 per cent of America’s federal budget. Instead, the chances of humanity becoming “multi-planetary” rest solely on SpaceX. Only 4,000-5,000 of its staff are working on Starship, the rocket meant to take people to Mars. “That’s it, for the whole world,” he said. “No one else is even trying.”