Aiming to replace the International Space Station when it retires in 2030, big moves are afoot at Long Beach-based startup Vast.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Jed McCaleb in 2021, the space station company has stepped up as a key player in Southern California’s thriving aerospace industry. The company secured $500 million earlier this month through a funding round led by Balerion Space Ventures, the first time for Vast to receive external funding. It also moved into its largest facility to date in January in Long Beach, hosting more than 1,000 employees.
In addition, the startup expanded its international footprint into Japan last year. It has been selected by NASA to helm the sixth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station with a target launch date no earlier than next summer. Its first commercial space station, Haven-1, is slated to launch next year.
Vast Chief Executive Max Haot talked with the Business Journal about the company’s transition from a startup to a major player in Long Beach’s aerospace industry and upcoming milestones.
The commercial space race is all the rage recently. How does Vast capture the moment and how does it continue to attract public and private business partners?
We are at the key moment for human space flight. Vast is a space station company, and obviously that relates to human spaceflight. We had a key, really exciting moment where we are transitioning from government-owned, cost-plus type contract for space and human space flight to really a commercial era where the government and NASA and also other agencies around the world, including in Japan, JAXA and in Europe, the European Space Agency and others are all interested in participating and supporting a migration from a government owned space station, International Space Station, to a commercially operated one, where they are supporters and customers, right where they help us develop it. They help us with engineering, with safety, with funding. But ultimately, at the end, they are a customer and user of it for doing important science and research with a crewed mission.
The ISS is due to be retired right now in 2030, might be 2032, but in all cases it’s due to be retired. It’s aging. It’s too expensive. It’s a partnership with Russia, which is not geopolitically where we want to be, in that it really creates that opportunity to switch to a commercial alternative that will be lower cost to NASA, to taxpayers around the world in opening a completely new era of science, research and manufacturing under that umbrella.
So back to your question. It’s this unique transition that has to occur, and we are here as a company in Long Beach really focused on capturing that opportunity and winning NASA’s business.
What is Vast’s key competitive edge in this conversation?
Our industry focus is crewed space stations or crewed space systems. It starts with a space station in low-earth orbit. It will be a bigger space station in a different orbit. And we also are interested to participate in habitat for the moon and for Mars. All of these are connected by a clear theme, which is crewed space habitat in space station. If you really take a step back, there’s actually never been a commercial space station built by any company. Our key goal is obviously to achieve that in the safest but also fastest way possible and become a commercial space station company. It’s a race, and no one has done it, and we believe we will be first.
Back to your question on what’s unique to our approach, the first point is, when we look at our competitors and their progress and our progress, we believe we’ll have the world’s first commercial space station called Haven-1, launching in Q1 next year.
The other part is that we are vertically integrated in a way to be able to replace an International Space Station with as much capability for supporting a continuous crew. We believe that we have to be able to build, not only economically viable modules – low cost, affordable modules – but also we have to do them at a high speed.
What are some business or technical milestones that you wish to hit before the launch of Haven-1 next year?
The big last milestone that occurred other than our demo mission on Haven-1 is that we completed the manufacturing of the primary structure in the testing at our Mojave test site, the acceptance testing of it, and we started integration in January. That’s the process where we have the flight hull, the primary structure. It’s been tested. It’s ready for receiving all of its content inside and outside. And it’s in a clean room right here in Long Beach right now.
The next milestone is the completion of the integration in different phases. We’re doing thermal control systems, propulsion, life support systems. We’ll be integrating the avionics, the interior, all the laboratory experiments, and then the micro meteorite shielding and so on. That is expected to culminate towards the end of this year, to then be sent to a NASA facility called the Glenn Research Center, the Armstrong Glenn Research Center in Ohio, where we do thermal vacuum test and vibration test of the full space station assembled. Then, if that goes well, it goes to the launch site in Florida for launch on a Falcon-9 rocket in Q1 exit.
What’s the strategic importance of Haven-1 for Vast? What does launching Haven-1 successfully mean for the development of Haven-2?
There is no actual commercial space station company that exists today. The moment we launch Haven-1 – and then we bring a crew of four on a SpaceX (Falcon 9), enter the space station, spend two weeks, come back home safely off the coast of San Diego or Los Angeles – once we’ve achieved all of that, we are officially a proven commercial space station company. That’s a really big deal. No one has done that yet. There’s been (a) government program that builds (a) space station. It’s never been done commercially by a company on its own, one that they own. That’s obviously the state that we should desire.
What it means for the next space station is … If you look at our plan in architecture, it’s one of our key differentiated approaches that we believe in steppingstones. We don’t believe we should go directly to a continuously crewed space station or multi-module space station. Our first steppingstone was the satellite to prove all these technologies. Our next steppingstone is to send Haven-1 without a crew to make sure everything is functioning and operating safely and perfectly. After that, we’ll be sending the crew to Haven-1. And then after that, we’ll start making modules that can assemble together, which is our Haven-2. In Haven-2, if you look at the modules we are building, they are just derivatives of Haven 1. Those upgrades, they have two docking ports instead of one. And there’s various upgrades that come in. But you could think of the Haven-1 technology being the design that we will have proven being maybe 80% of what we need for the Haven-2 design. Going from zero to one is the hardest thing you can do in any company. But after Haven-1, it’s a much smaller incremental step to basically build the derivative module that will create Haven-2.
Vast expanded into Japan last December with a subsidiary helmed by former JAXA astronaut Naoko Yamazaki. What would the Japanese expansion mean to Vast as a company, and why did Vast make the move?
If you look at the human spaceflight market, the biggest player in the market is NASA and the U.S. government in the Western world, and then the two other biggest, which were the original key partner of the ISS, are Europe and Japan and Canada as well. All of these nations and countries want to also continue their human space flight program after the ISS has retired, and their important science and research.
They’ve all expressed that they want to work with whoever NASA selects in this next phase, so that Japan and Europe are probably equal in terms of the contribution in human spaceflight and as a market, so we take them very seriously with NASA as the three entities that we need to be working with. And as part of that, being a local team led by JAXA astronaut Naoko (Yamazaki) and some of our other team members having an office, local relationship, local subsidiary. Locally, we’ve announced (investors such as) the biggest bank in Japan, MUFG, Nikon and Mitsui, which has been involved in space as a trading company. To do business, to be serious, and do business in a remote, international region, it’s obvious that you should be there in infrastructure and people. That’s why we did it.
How does the Vast plan to grow its roots in Long Beach, and continue to expand and collaborate with the local aerospace company surrounding you?
We just leased a new building. That’s our fourth building in Long Beach. When we first arrived and announced at a mayoral event, we had given a projection of how much we would grow within five years, and we are well beyond that. So, we already (have) more than 1,000 employees and have exceeded that commitment.
But the future for us, in terms of future growth, really depends on the successful winning (of) the NASA contract, continuing to secure all the programs. We certainly hope that that will be that over time, the horizon that will be even much bigger than we are today, as we as we succeed.
What are some trends in the aerospace industry that Vast can take advantage of?
Space infrastructure has been relatively flat for decades. Between the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s and even late 2010 there was only about 4,000 active satellites in space for the world … in the last five years, that’s grown to 14,000. Right last week, SpaceX reached 10,000 active Starlink satellites. If you put that on a plot, it goes from a very stale industry – space infrastructure satellite that is not growing – to a complete “hockey stick.”
Obviously, we have the SpaceX IPO coming up, the incredible growth of Starlink for communication, the proposal to expand data centers in space for AI application. That’s all new, and that’s driving a trend that means more mass to orbit, more launch, more reusable rockets.
