Vast

Haven-1 is a single module: ten metres long, 4.4 across, fourteen tonnes, with 45 cubic metres of pressurised volume for four people on stays of ten to thirty days. It launches complete on one Falcon 9, and that is the design constraint everything else follows from. Anything that would make it a standalone station has been deliberately left out. The Crew Dragon that brings the astronauts stays docked and supplies long-duration life support, and there is no toilet aboard Haven-1 because Dragon has one.

Jed McCaleb made his money founding Mt. Gox, Ripple and Stellar, and has put more than a billion dollars of it into Vast, most of it his own. What he says he actually wants is artificial gravity, a spinning station in the 2030s, and Haven-1 exists to get there by being first rather than by being complete. The reasoning is competitive. NASA has been slow to choose a successor to the International Space Station, so Vast is building without waiting to be chosen, on the theory that hardware in orbit beats a proposal on a desk.

It has not flown. Haven-1's launch has moved from August 2025 to May 2026 to late 2026 to the first quarter of 2027, and the crewed mission after it has no date at all, because SpaceX must independently agree that Dragon can safely dock; Max Haot has said that could come two weeks after launch or any time within three years. What has flown is Haven Demo, a free-flyer that tested the communications, power, propulsion and control systems in late 2025 and was deliberately deorbited afterwards. The flight article is welded and in integration. Vast has spent over a billion dollars and has yet to earn station revenue, against a NASA commercial station programme that was put on hold in January 2026, restructured, and still unawarded that summer. In May 2026 Vast started selling a high-power satellite bus, which reads either as sensible diversification or as a hedge, depending on how the station lands.