Race for first private space station heats up as Nasa plans 2030 ISS retirement
Companies like Vast, Axiom and Blue Origin are in a fierce competition to develop commercial space habitats
With Nasa’s International Space Station set to come out of service in 2030, American aerospace firm Vast has stepped into a frenzied race for the world’s first commercial space station.
Haven-1 - a mini station scheduled for launch in May 2026 - has been designed for comfort, according to Andrew Feustel, a former Nasa astronaut now an adviser at Vast.
“It has a three-year lifespan, and over that period of time, we plan to visit the spacecraft with multiple crews of four, four at a time,” he said on the sidelines of the Web Summit in Lisbon.
The California-based firm, founded in 2021 by billionaire Jed McCaleb, aspires to replace the International Space Station with Haven-2, a larger version of the first model.
But Vast faces fierce competition from other contenders, including Axiom Space, Voyager Space in partnership with Airbus, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.