Month: July 2026

I’ll let them speak to the details, and trust me…it’s fucking awesome.

The International Space Station is 25 years old, cost $155 billion, and leaks. A startup called Vast thinks it can build the replacement for about a billion dollars, and it plans to launch the first piece in 2027. In this episode, Ashlee Vance heads to Vast’s headquarters in Long Beach, California for a full tour of Haven-1, the spacecraft the company expects to be the world’s first commercial space station. Vast is the wildcard in the race to replace the ISS, moving faster than rivals like Axiom, Blue Origin and Starlab, and it’s doing it the SpaceX way: everything designed, built and tested in house, from the hatch to the micrometeorite shielding to the actual flight hull sitting next to the cafeteria.

The money comes from Jed McCaleb, the crypto billionaire who believes humanity needs a frontier and is willing to spend a fortune to open one. The building falls to CEO Max Haot, who walks Ashlee through mission control, the hull welding operation, and the numbers that make competitors nervous. Vast builds pressure vessels in six months for under $5 million while others pay 55 million euros and wait four years. NASA showed up in 2023 expecting a science fair. They’ve been coming back every quarter since.

Then NASA astronaut Drew Feustel, who spent 225 days on the ISS, takes over for the fun part: a space food taste test featuring freeze dried tiramisu and tales of trading for duck confit in orbit, the largest window ever flown to space, a zero gravity sleep pod that hugs you, and a walkthrough of Haven-1’s surprisingly roomy interior. Four people will live aboard for two week missions, with a SpaceX Dragon serving as taxi, lifeboat and bathroom. Ashlee walked in skeptical after 15 years of covering commercial space delays. He walked out believing this thing is actually going to fly.