TL;DR: NASA's long-telegraphed shift away from the International Space Station is now centered on a slate of commercially built space stations, but the transition is entering its next phase without clear ground rules for how those platforms will be selected or funded. As NASA delays its phase two requirements, one contender – Vast Space – is pressing ahead anyway, betting that a compact, rapidly iterated station flying before the end of the decade can sustain US and international crews in low Earth orbit while seeding a new market for orbital manufacturing.
Vast's first platform, Haven-1, is deliberately modest in scale but ambitious in both schedule and purpose. The station is designed as a roughly 15-ton autonomous outpost that will launch uncrewed aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, initially operate as a free-flying satellite, and later transition to hosting short-duration human missions.
In an extensive interview with Ars Technica, Vast chief executive Max Haot said the company has completed the primary structure and portions of the secondary structure, with acceptance testing finished in November and clean-room integration now underway.
The integration campaign begins with the thermal control system and propulsion, followed by interior shells and avionics, with the goal of reaching final closeout by the fall. That milestone would precede a full test campaign at NASA's Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio.
Haven-1's launch timeline has slipped from mid-2026 to the first quarter of 2027, a delay Haot described as the most realistic date Vast can "confidently" meet for its first station. Even with the slip, he argues, the company remains one to two years ahead of other commercial space station efforts.
The mission profile is designed to de-risk crewed operations. Haven-1 will launch without a crew and undergo an uncrewed checkout period of at least two weeks, during which Vast will verify pressure integrity, attitude control, and overall system functionality.
Only after convincing SpaceX – through contractual milestones and technical verification – that the station is safe to dock with a Dragon spacecraft will the first crewed mission fly. That window could open as early as two weeks after launch or extend as late as three years.
Haven-1 is optimized for short expeditions rather than continuous occupancy. The nominal plan calls for two-week crewed missions – roughly 10 days docked, plus about two days of transit on either side – with one mission fully contracted with SpaceX, a second reserved via deposit and option, and two additional missions envisioned over the station's three-year operational life. Vast is also leaving the door open to a 30-day mission if customer demand or NASA requirements justify longer stays.
Crew selection remains in flux. Haot says Vast is in "deep negotiations" with both private individuals and nation-states but is not yet ready to make announcements, adding that the revised Q1 2027 launch date makes finalizing a crew increasingly urgent.
Vast believes a one-year training timeline for Dragon and Haven-1 operations is comfortable and could be compressed to roughly six months for an experienced crew. That flexibility, Haot said, gives the company schedule margin to align customer commitments with its planned flight profile.
Vast's second station, Haven-2, is architected as a modular complex that begins with an initial operational module in 2028 and expands to a nine-module configuration by 2032. The system is explicitly positioned as a commercial successor to the International Space Station.
The first Haven-2 module retains the same 4.4-meter diameter as Haven-1 but increases length from 10.1 meters to 16 meters and nearly doubles launch mass to about 29,000 kilograms. On-board consumables scale accordingly, rising from 160 to 720 crew days.
Vast envisions a cadence of module launches approximately every six months starting in 2028. The station would evolve from an initial Haven configuration supporting crews of four, plus a four-person handover, into progressively larger two-, three-, and four-module layouts with increasing payload capacity and power. The roadmap culminates in a nine-module complex by 2032.
In its final configuration, Haven-2 is designed to support a crew of 12, with approximately 500 cubic meters of habitable crew volume and 1,160 cubic meters of total pressurized volume. The station would be powered by 86 kilowatts of total electrical output, with 40 kilowatts allocated specifically to payloads.
Vast is positioning Haven-1 and Haven-2 as flexible responses to NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations program, even as the space agency has yet to publish phase-two requirements or issue a formal request for proposals. Haot says the company has not decided whether to bid a 30-day demonstration mission using Haven-1 in 2027 or a multi-module Haven-2 configuration, largely because it remains unclear what NASA will ultimately require.
Within NASA's current CLD budget framework – projected over five years and assumed to support two primary station providers plus associated service contracts – Haot argues that Vast can operate profitably alongside one other winner. A larger budget, he adds, could potentially sustain a third station. While he agrees that the ISS should be extended if no commercial platform is ready, Haot insists that Vast intends to meet NASA's timeline and that agency policy should be structured to encourage that outcome.
For now, the first test of that strategy will come not in 2030, but with a single 15-ton module launched aboard a Falcon 9. If Haven-1 performs as designed and successfully transitions from an uncrewed platform to a short-duration human outpost, it would give Vast something few commercial space companies possess: a proven, iterated space station architecture flying years before the International Space Station is retired.