This New Space Station Is Ready To Launch Next Year

Captain's log, stardate 1513.1. The International Space Station has been around for a quarter century. It has cost the United States and Russia $155 billion. I have been sent to this office foyer to do this bit and to update you on the plans for a new era of space living. We're at the headquarters of Vast Space. They are a commercial space habitat company. They're gonna try to replace the ISS, and we are gonna check on their progress. The ISS, of course, is one of humanity's great achievements. It has bonded nations around science and our shared yearning to explore and go beyond Earth. It is, however, also way past its sell-by date. It creaks, it leaks, and it's been bombarded by space debris for decades. Vast's big idea for what's next is this. It's called the Haven 1, and it's meant to fly to space in 2027. It will be modern and sleek and have science labs and room for 4 people. Building Haven 1 will cost about $1 billion, which is a lot of money. The man paying for much of this is Jed McCaleb. He's smart, super rich, and super into science and space, which is nice. It's super important for humanity to, like, get out into the solar system. The human psyche needs, like, a frontier, right? This is the way we evolved. Like, there's always been new lands to explore. And I have a lot of money, sure, but I don't have, like, infinite amount of money for space station business. And there has to be an economic engine that's driving this whole thing. The person tasked with actually building Haven 1 and its successors is this guy, Max Hout.

3 cameras, wow.

And he's under considerable pressure to do stuff on time and on budget, which never happens in the space industry, but he's smiling anyway. This is what we'll look like when we're in space.

Well, hopefully you're not here in space. You're inside and you're much smaller. But yes, that's Haven 1. And it's really, you know, not the end in itself. It's our first stepping stone for crewed spaceflight. So our key approach is that before we build a multimodule space station that can have crew continuously on it, which is what the ISS is, we need stepping stones to get there. So the first one of these stepping stones is our demo satellite, which we just launched. The next one, which we're launching in Q1 2027 and building now, is Haven-1. We expect it will be the world's first commercial space station. No one has ever done it. And more importantly, it will be sustainable, low cost. And so our view is that to replace the ISS and obviously go even beyond that with habitat on Moon, Mars, and other orbit, the first step is lower cost. Our approach to do it is vertical integration, speed, and mass production.

In other words, let's see what happens when companies, and not bureaucratic nation-states, make these things. Holy cow, man. Everybody should have one of these.

We could play some games if you want later. Not really.

Vast finds itself in the midst of a competition to replace the ISS. Several groups, including the likes of Axiom, Blue Origin, and Starlab Space, are all racing to get to space with their various habitat designs. Vast has been the wildcard of the bunch and has seemed to be moving much faster than its rivals.

So yeah, this is our master control room designed for human spaceflight. We tested it already for our first mission, which is our demonstration satellite that we launch on November 2nd.

And liftoff.

Which we use to test all of the key technologies of Haven-1, excluding the human ones.

So computing, solar panels—

Computers, software, solar panels, batteries, all the procedures, all the operators. The key one is that we wanted to deorbit it controllably. We had a box of a few hundred kilometers and we hit it just a little bit on the side, but full success. So it's a great, you know, stepping stone mission before Haven-1. So now with Haven-1, we get to launch it with all the crew. And then at that point, it's a very large satellite. Once we get comfortable that it's safe, you know, kind of our big brother SpaceX. They then do the job of transiting the crew to Haven 1, and then once we are docked, crew then open the hatch and stay there for 2 weeks. And it's also— Dragon is also a lifeboat, so if something goes wrong, you have procedure for the crew to retreat into Dragon and then reenter using the normal process.

Super cool.

You guys are so far the rare space company— you're moving quite fast. These things usually are many, many delays on the on the journey.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, our friends at SpaceX definitely set the pace for everybody else. And right now all the focus is on Haven 1, the space station being built.

Cool. Vast's engineering compound is impressive. The company has hundreds of people beavering away across multiple buildings, everyone operating under the daunting task of making something that only massive governments constructed before.

This is a hatch designed in-house, manufactured, assembled in-house, tested in-house. Not because we wanted to, because there's no other choice. You know, we could find an engineering company that we could pay to make a hatch for us, but they would charge us a lot more than it would cost us to do it in-house. And you can try it. So, okay, turn 4 times, go for it until it stops.

Oh wow. Yeah.

And then you can hold this and open it up.

This is like a must.

Obviously in zero-g, it will be a lot lighter. Lighter. And whoever will do it will open the ERA to commercial space stations. So just one of the components.

It's a symbolic hatch.

And so this is the Whipple shield, the micrometeorite shielding. So this represents the primary structure, the hull of Haven 1 that holds the pressure. And then you have these two layers that are there to protect from these small micromaterials. So you can have debris in space that are big enough that you can use the thrusters to avoid them, but you can also have small ones that you can't detect. And so we go to a facility where we fire a piece of aluminum about a square millimeter at orbital velocity, so 7.5 kilometers per second.

Okay.

I think it's about 20 times the speed of a handgun. Okay. It first hits the this piece of aluminium representing the outer layer, and then this layer, it's a ballistic layer, is designed to stop it so that this layer, which is the pressure hull, is intact. You clearly can see that you wouldn't want this to happen.

And that's like the worst-case scenario, or that's every impact?

So you do— I mean, we, to qualify it, we have to do hundreds of tests. Are you taking care of every single eventuality? No, it's all a risk risk matrix probabilistic kind of assessment approach to it.

And it does, it gets hit.

Yes, I mean, because every day they hear some sort of impact. Yeah. It's interesting, we had our first meeting with NASA September 2023, and at that time we had this building, but it's like literally empty with like a science fair, and you could tell they were like, you're gonna do this in 3 years? Good luck with this. And then they've been back every quarter since, and it's like, oh, you're actually doing this.

Yeah. The major goal, of course, is this thing. Oh my God, this is cool, man. So this is just like right by the cafeteria.

It's a good place. Where else should it be?

It's a good place to work. That's all right.

Yeah, so welcome to the AVEN One integration room. This is the actual hull. This is the main structure of Haven 1. That's where the hatch goes, and that's where Dragon will mount. It's aluminum 2219, 35 panels. We mill it according to the design, put threads in the right place. Then we roll it, and then we've welded it all together.

Can I peek in?

Yeah, you can peek in. Hey, guys.

Spacious, man. It must, like, blow your mind. You're building a fucking space station.

Absolutely. This incredible team. It's really all to do with the team and the amazing talent we have. But the other key is the timeline. We've seen these external vendors take 4 years or more to deliver it. We build them in 6 months here. Competitors are buying at €55 million. Our internal cost is less than $5 million.

Who do you view as your main competitor?

Time. Obviously, I'm very biased, but the amount of technology we have under our control in-house developed, vertically integrated. I think we're years ahead of all our competition. But you can go see them and ask them what they think.

Haven 1 will be a test of Vast's technology. By 2028, Vast hopes to start launching Haven 2. These will be roomier modules that can be linked together to form a real ISS replacement over the course of several years. By 2035, VAST wants to be making very large stations that produce artificial gravity, which is where I plan to spend my future vacations. But to really understand what life might be like inside of Haven 1, we would ideally need an astronaut. And we happened to find one. Drew Feustel is your typical astronaut overachiever. He's a geophysicist with many science degrees. Is fit and sharp. He has spent 225 days in space, and so he knows the ISS very well. FAST wants to use Drew's expertise as a way to improve space life for the people aboard Haven. The first thing one might want to improve, of course, is the space food. And it turns out FAST has a whole food engineering program underway that's run by Zach Rosenthal. He's working on everything from better meals to better utensils. What, like, what do people eat on the ISS today? Do you guys— do they alternate between Russian, Japanese, US?

We barter.

Okay.

We barter in space. Like, I figured out the thing I like the best, which was duck confit. Um, and Alex Gerst, the German, had that because, uh, Lufthansa made him this special food. So I literally would trade him anything he wanted if he would give me cans of duck confit.

What should we try? What's good, Drew?

It's all good.

If we want to start here, we can start off with a caramel apple granola.

It's good.

Pretty good, right? So this is going to be our vegetable curry with rice.

And this is off the— like, I could buy this.

You can buy this. Actually, a lot of the products you can buy because they're based on camping foods or something like that that are designed for ease of packing and lightweight.

Since it's part of the government, NASA could not really do sponsorship deals with food companies. Vast, though, is free to chase crass commercialization and profit as it sees fit.

Let's move on to dinner.

Okay.

Right now we have a creamy sausage and tomato pasta.

The goal is for the space travelers to eat better and for companies to attach their brands to the cosmos. Space Pepsi, anyone?

So with dessert, we're going to have freeze-dried tiramisu, actually.

Yeah, everything tastes good so far.

This is— this is—

I'm not as sympathetic to you guys as I was walking into this.

You're like, all the hardships of being an astronaut? You know, everything that we do in space is controlled and it's timed down to the, you know, 5-minute increments. But food is the one thing that you have control over. You can decide what you want to eat, mostly when you want to eat it, how much you want to eat. You really cling to that as being something that you own. And so that's why it's so important to get it right.

Okay, that makes sense.

So this is actually the utensil kit that we're sending with the crew, and we send them a scissor, we send them a nice pair of chopsticks, and we send them a spoon. So Drew and I were doing a lot of work on trying to optimize this. So when you— first off, you don't want to be a short spoon. You want to stick your hand in that pouch, get a bunch of food all over your hand. That's a mess. And then it has a nice flat tip here so you can kind of scrape the sides of the pouch down, access the corners easier. This is actually yours to keep, so you can— you can take that with you.

Got good weight to it. Yeah, that's This is going up in the podcast studio. I'll ask the question. The Russians, they sneak the vodka on their side.

I can neither confirm nor deny what you're talking to me about right now. Want to go for a beer afterwards?

We can talk.

The food and the spoon were nice, but I wanted to learn about all that the Haven 1 has to offer.

This is how we look at Earth from the Haven 1. One spacecraft. We have one window. Windows are hard in space. Did you ever watch like The Right Stuff?

Yeah.

Yeah. Where are you planning on putting a window?

Window?

There's no window.

We want a window.

And this is your chance to, you know, be in space and look at Earth.

It's like bigger than I would have— it really looks like that.

Yeah. You're only 250 miles up. So think about driving 250 miles, right? It's just not that far if you look at a map. That's why it's called low Earth orbit, because it's, it's pretty low. Any lower, you're going to get sucked back into the Earth. Any higher, you're going to get hit with debris.

So that makes sense.

You know, Haven 1 is a relatively small spacecraft. It's only designed for 4 people, so one window should be sufficient for everybody to get time.

And but they were saying this is like the biggest window that's ever been on a, uh, it's bigger in diameter than any window that's ever flown.

Okay.

Yeah, this is the first time I've ever We've never done an interview through a—

Through the glass. Before you get out of there though, we want to take your picture, so you can look this way. Okay, here it comes. 3, 2, 1, go for launch!

Next up, True wanted to take me to bed, and I happen to have a standing policy to do whatever an astronaut tells me.

That's a crew quarters.

It's pretty big.

Yeah, it's pretty big, isn't it? It's like bigger than you probably than I really thought. The thing is though that the airflow in the spacecraft will come from your head to your feet.

Okay.

If you spin around, which you can do, you just have to think about which way the airflow is going.

For comfort?

Oh, there's other considerations like if you're passing gas or anything like that. Which end do you want to be of the airflow? You want to be upstream or downstream? Scooch down a little. Yeah.

This is the thing you helped to design?

Yeah, that's the thing.

All right. I feel like I'm a bag of popcorn in a microwave.

Getting ready to pop. So I don't know how—

No, it's good. It's good. Yeah, I can feel it. It's like getting a hug.

Yeah, it's like being hugged. Yeah. I'm going to close the door.

Okay.

And you'll get a sense for how the light reflects in there, and it should get a little brighter in there because of the reflections.

That was nice.

So it's pretty well lit. So we'll go— That's max bright.

Oh, that's cool.

And then here's max sunset.

This is like Brian Johnson's red light therapy. With them having Starlink on there, would you watch Netflix?

You could. You can do that on ISS right now with the right— yeah, we have good enough coverage that it's not Starlink, but it's—

but do you feel like you're wasting your time or sometimes you just want to relax?

I never felt that way. I mean, I think I watched all of Game of Thrones Game of Thrones. I watched almost all of Breaking Bad in space. And then I watched a lot of races in space every Sunday and Saturday.

This is cool.

Yeah.

While the ISS has been a marvel of science and engineering, it's old as shit. It's basically the Windows 95 of space habitats. VAST has an opportunity to take 25 years of learning and make things better.

This is Haven 1.

This is cool, man. This has to be way more Scandinavian chic than the ISS. That's the first time I've heard that, but you're right.

The Dragon would be there. You'd come through the hatch, through the tunnel, through the corridor, into the common area. Our payloads live behind the wall behind you.

So like if I'm doing science, I'm doing it over here.

It's there behind that wall. And we basically pull the panels off the wall, set them aside, and that accesses all of our science payloads. And then where you're standing here would be a table, like a pop-up table, which would allow us to do the experiments on a surface, but also to have meals together. Okay. We need a place to eat together. The window that we just looked at is over your head. So that's our domed window. And you just float up. And just push off with your toes and you'll be at the top in no time. You know, one of the main features of the spacecraft is the air revitalization. So if you and I are sitting here talking and looking at each other and breathing, we're creating a CO2 cloud around our heads. And if there's no air distribution at all, we will eventually be asphyxiated. So it's really important to have a good air circulation system. Oh my God. And that's what's— yeah, that's a real thing. And so what's in here is a mockup of our air revitalization system. The air flows around the slats in the front, goes into a main filter system, runs through the floor here. Part of the air goes into the sleep cores, and then the main airflow all comes back down the front. So that's how we mix the air inside the spacecraft at all times.

And I know Haven 1's smaller than the ISS, and we're getting, you know, bigger and bigger over time. So maybe it's hard to do apples to apples but like for 4 people in this space, this is pretty big. Yeah, this is big.

In fact, this module is about the size of an ISS module. This is not much different. What is different is the way that we built the interior structures. So we have these sort of long corridors and tunnels because a lot of our hardware and stowage is behind these walls.

And people will be sleeping? Yes, down here.

Yep, absolutely. So this is the, this is the corridor And in the corridor we have 4 sleeping bunks. So there's 2 in the overhead and there's 2 on the floor. Otherwise, in these corridors, the stowage areas behind us— so these are all doors that open up into racks for avionics equipment, like actually operating systems of the vehicle, or stowage.

So you guys have this much—

you—

this is where you're hanging out the whole time with 4 people?

Yeah, well, I mean, you have Dragon as well. In fact, the toilet is in Dragon, so you'll be using both spaces.

So like the first time you saw what Vast was hoping to do, what was your immediate reaction?

Well, I mean, I was attracted to this company immediately. I mean, in my mind I was like, this is the best thing that I could think of to do with my knowledge base and my experiences to come and contribute to this because the approach is very elegant. It's simple, it's elegant, and I think it's fully achievable. Haven 1 will launch to space regardless of what happens with ISS or the next generation. We will launch this, and this will either serve as the platform or the start of the platform or lead us to the next generation of those spacecraft.

I should know this, but are you, are you scheduled to go?

I am not scheduled. I am I could fly on this spacecraft, but that's not the intention. We want to create a space economy, and part of that means getting revenue for every seat we have.

Do you want to go back one day, or have you got enough?

Wouldn't you? Yeah. I'm not going to say no, man.

Maybe bad things happen up there.

You're going to see me at the front of the line. There's no doubt about it.

Yeah.

OK. But I've done my thing. I've had my glory day in the hot sun, and I'm happy to pass the torch. But I wouldn't say no to a spaceflight.

So what do you make of all this, Ashlee Vance? Okay, if you're a space dork like me, you usually walk into these places, everything is incredibly behind schedule, usually cool, but like, you know, it's gonna be a long, long, long, long, long, long, long wait before anything happens. I would say these guys actually seem like They got their shit together. I've been following commercial space now, I'd say, for close to like 15 years, and it's funny how things that seemed very far-fetched maybe 15 years ago now feel a lot more real. You come somewhere like this and like quite clearly they're making a very serious go. They're making this happen and this thing is gonna go to space whether it all checks out from like a business case so people can make money from this stuff, you know, I think you have to wait and see. But yeah, it's like one of these milestones where you feel like we're obviously in a new era of all this stuff.