DOHA, Qatar–Two American space startups came to a stage almost 7,000 miles from Washington with an unusual message for policymakers there: Please pick a company soon to build a replacement for the International Space Station, even if it’s not us.
“We are all waiting eagerly for the procurement for the next phase to really get going,” Vast Space CEO Max Haot said on a panel at Web Summit Qatar before commenting that time is “getting a little short.”
NASA plans to retire the aging ISS—assembled over dozens of launches that began in 1998, now big enough to see from the ground—and send it on a controlled reentry targeted at an empty patch of the Pacific Ocean in 2030. That leaves little time for NASA to advance the “Commercial Destinations” program that it opened in 2021 to the point of awarding contracts to build and launch hardware.
Haot described Vast as “very confident” that it will have its Haven-2 station ready by 2030 if NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman moves the commercial-station program forward after a reboot last year to compensate for reduced funding. But Haot also warned against further stalls in a contracting process that is now technically “on hold”: “We won’t be if they wait another year or so to make a decision.”
His interviewer, Qatar Investment Authority communications director Cengiz Oztelcan, did not ask Haot’s fellow panelist, Jonathan Cirtain, CEO and president of Axiom Space, about that company’s readiness. But Axiom has also said that its own Axiom Station will be ready by 2030.
Cirtain, for his part, emphasized the importance of not allowing a gap between the last American astronaut exiting the ISS and the first crew moving into a successor station while China’s space station program continues.
“We’ve learned this lesson now twice,” he said, referring to the almost six years between the last Apollo mission in 1975 and the space shuttle’s debut in 1981 and the nearly nine years between the shuttle’s 2011 finale and SpaceX’s restoration of human spaceflight to American soil in 2020. Both of those gaps looked bad but also ate away at American capabilities.
“This continued human presence isn’t just a stunt for the sake of geopolitics,” Cirtain said. “It really is a lesson learned from 75 years of human spaceflight.”
Haot backed him up: “For us, it’s just not an option to cede low earth orbit to China.”
Some assembly required. (Credit: Axiom Space)
Axiom and Vast are taking different approaches and both have fallen behind their original schedules to varying degrees.
Axiom is opting for a simplified version of the ISS’s modular design—starting by docking its own station’s first module to the ISS, then building out that assembly before undocking it. But while that starter segment was once projected to reach the ISS by last year, Axiom now estimates that it will happen by the end of 2027.
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Cirtain said Axiom was only developing certain types of technology in-house while relying on established firms for others. For instance, it’s “put a lot of money” into optimizing its own environment control and life support systems but hired Thales Alenia Space to build the pressure vessels for its modules. But managing that supply chain has become what Cirtain described as “a very complex component” for Axiom.
Vast, meanwhile, has adopted the vertically integrated approach of SpaceX: building everything in-house and emphasizing common parts whenever possible. “The decision we made is to focus on mass production and vertical integration,” Haot said.
Vast has also designed its single-module Haven-1 station small enough to be launched, fully assembled, by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Haven-2, revealed as an ISS-replacement proposal in October 2024, would involve docking multiple modules together over a series of launches.
But while Vast has a pathfinder spacecraft in orbit now to test such systems as avionics and propulsion, Haven-1’s launch has slipped from the May 2026 timeframe Vast touted as recently as November (in a panel at Web Summit Lisbon featuring its lead astronaut Andrew Feustel) to the first quarter of 2027.
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Axiom and Vast have competition for NASA’s commercial-station project from two consortiums. One led by Blue Origin is pitching a large, multi-module station called Orbital Reef, to be built over a series of launches by its New Glenn rocket; another run by Airbus and Voyager Technologies is designing a station called Starlab to be delivered in a single launch of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket.
After years of delay, New Glenn has now launched successfully twice. Starship has yet to put anything in orbit in a launch campaign that began almost three years ago.
The actual commercial demand for any private space station remains unclear, but Cirtain and Haot voiced confidence in their ability to sign up companies looking to test and manufacture such products as pharmaceuticals and semiconductors in near-zero gravity.
“The real upside: microgravity manufacturing at scale,” Haot said.
“We can commercialize a lot of the lessons learned from the space station,” Cirtain said.
The two executives also stuck to a we’re-all-on-the-same-team attitude. Haot’s version: “It would be a privilege for both of our companies, or either of our companies, to have the chance to replace the International Space Station.”
DIsclosure: Web Summit Qatar covered my airfare and lodging for my role as a panel moderator.
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