Race for First Private Space Station Heats Up as NASA Prepares to Retire the ISS

At the Web Summit in Lisbon, Andrew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut who now advises the California company Vast, described a spacecraft built with comfort in mind. It is called Haven-1, a mini station scheduled to launch in May 2026. Feustel told AFP it has a three-year lifespan, during which Vast plans to send multiple crews of four to visit it.

Haven-1 is Vast's opening move in a crowded race. NASA's International Space Station is due to come out of service in 2030, and several companies want to build the first commercial station to follow it. Vast was founded in 2021 by billionaire Jed McCaleb. It aims to replace the ISS with Haven-2, a larger version of the first model. Its rivals include Axiom Space, Voyager Space in partnership with Airbus, and Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

The prize is a NASA budget of up to $1.5 billion for developing commercial space stations, which is due to be awarded in April 2026. The ISS is expensive to keep running: NASA spends up to $4 billion a year on it, roughly a third of the agency's annual human spaceflight budget. Ugo Bonnet, director of the Spaceflight Institute, which trains people for commercial human missions, said space agencies no longer want to manage that kind of infrastructure.

NASA's reasons are also strategic. Locked in competition with China, the agency wants to concentrate on crewed missions to the Moon by the end of the decade and, eventually, a base on the lunar surface. For the ISS successor it plans to buy services instead of managing programmes itself, an arrangement that is a real boon for private companies in the space market.

The suppliers are adjusting. Thales Alenia Space, a French-Italian joint venture, is due to deliver the first two pressurised modules for Axiom's planned station, which could be operational as early as 2028. The company also built half the pressurised modules for the ISS. Roberto Angelini, director of its Exploration and Science Domain, said many players are arriving with very aggressive timelines and that things cannot be done the way they were in the past. Its main challenge, he said, is to remain competitive on price.

SpaceX's reusable rockets made these projects thinkable by lowering transport costs. Vast plans to launch Haven-1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9, and Axiom's private mission will carry astronauts in a Crew Dragon capsule. Bonnet noted that sending a kilogram into space cost $60,000 just 15 to 20 years ago. He said that when SpaceX's Starship launcher becomes operational in 2030, the cost will fall below $200 per kilogram.

Cheaper launches do not make a station cheap to run, though. Beatrice Hainaut, a space policy researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research at the Military School, said she is not sure about the companies' long-term profitability. They are counting on rising demand from governments and the private sector. Vast predicts that 85 percent of its crewed mission revenue will come from state agencies and 15 percent from private clients. Feustel said the company wants to be a service provider not only to the US government but to any country that wants to send astronauts up for training and research, and that an astronaut can be put in space on a Vast spacecraft for less than $100 million.

The April 2026 NASA award is the next test. After that, the question is whether these firms can stay price-competitive and profitable beyond what government customers will pay.