As Ars reported last week, NASA's plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running out of time.
The sprawling International Space Station will be decommissioned in less than five years, and the U.S. space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several private companies.
While there are expected to be multiple bidders in “phase two” of NASA's commercial space station program, there are currently four major contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Vast Space. It is expected that sometime later this year the space agency will select one, or more likely two, of these companies for larger contracts that will support their efforts to build their stations.
To get a sense of the overall landscape as competition increases, Ars recently interviewed Voyager CEO Dylan Taylor about his company's plans for a private station, Starlab. Today we publish an interview with Max Haot, the CEO of Vast. The company is the furthest along in terms of development and has chosen to build a smaller temporary space station, Haven-1, suitable for short stays. Ultimately, NASA wants facilities that allow continuous habitation, but it is not clear whether that will be a requirement from 2030 onwards.
Until today, Haven-1 had a public launch date of mid-2026. However, as Haot explained in our interview, that launch date is no longer tenable.
Ars: You are moving the launch of Haven-1 from the middle of this year to the first quarter of 2027. Why?
Max Haot: This is obviously our first space station, and we're moving as safely and quickly as we can. That is the date we are confident we will meet. We've been tracking that date for a while now, without any slip. And that's still a year, probably two years or even more, ahead of anyone else. It will build the world's first commercial space station from scratch in less than four years, from an empty building and without a team.
