Forget building rockets. Nowadays, the ambitions of wealthy space entrepreneurs are focused on building commercial space stations that can act as a successor to NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) when it retires in the next coming years. While a handful of private companies are already racing to develop ISS alternatives, startup Vast Space has something that many of its competitors do not—tight connections with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and a willingness to lose mass amounts of cash.
Jed Mccaleb, the sole funder of Vast, is ready to sink $1 billion into the company’s commercial space station dreams, according to Bloomberg. “There’s not that many folks that are willing to dedicate the amount of resources and time and risk tolerance that I am,” he told the publication.
McCaleb, who currently has an estimated net worth of nearly $3 billion, is best known for creating Mt. Gox, an early Bitcoin trading platform that went bankrupt more than a decade ago, and co-founding Ripple, the blockchain company behind the cryptocurrency XRP. His other ventures include the early file-sharing service eDonkey and the open-source payments network Stellar.
In 2021, McCaleb pivoted from cryptocurrency to space when he founded the Long Beach, Calif.-based Vast. The company is vying to secure a NASA contract under the agency’s Commercial LEO Destination (CLD) program to replace the ISS with Haven-2, a commercial space station that it claims could be operational by 2028. The station would be a spin-off of Haven-1, a station Vast plans to launch by next year.
Musk, who has called for the ISS to be decommissioned earlier than NASA’s 2030 timeline, is intertwined in Vast’s vision. In addition to lending some of its technology to Vast, SpaceX has already agreed to deliver astronauts to Vast’s station.
Who else are building private space stations?
While NASA isn’t expected to select new CLD contracts until at least 2026, the agency is already funding three separate commercial space station efforts under the program. In 2020, it awarded more than $400 million through its first block of contracts from CLD.
The Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin was one of them, having received $130 million to create an operational space station alongside partners Boeing (BA) and Sierra Space. Blue Origin’s plan is to develop a mixed-use business park known as Orbital Reef that will host scientists, astronauts and space tourists.
Another big player is the Houston, Texas-based Axiom Space, which landed a $140 million NASA contract five years ago for its commercial space station dreams. The company, which is helmed by former ISS manager Michael Suffredini, is planning on installing a power module on the ISS in two years’ time that will subsequently undock and link with another module to form a free-flying station by 2028.
The third awardee was Voyager Space, a private space company now known as Voyager Technologies. In collaboration with Nanoracks and Lockheed Martin, it was granted $160 million for its efforts to create Starbase, a free-flying station that could see its first module launched as early as 2027.
NASA is hoping that being a customer for a privately-run space station will be more cost-effective than operating the ISS, which runs the agency $3 billion a year—a figure that totals roughly a third of NASA’s annual human space flight budget. Run by NASA and its partners across Europe, Japan, Russia and Canada since the 1990s, the station’s “technical lifetime” is limited, according to the agency.
NASA is currently eyeing a 2030 retirement date for the ISS with the help of a de-orbiting vehicle developed by SpaceX. As it descends back into the Earth’s atmosphere, much of the station will be destroyed, with its remaining debris targeting a remote area in the Pacific Ocean.
