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.
ABOUT THE HOST
Ashlee Vance is a best selling author, filmmaker, and journalist who has spent more than twenty years chronicling science and technology for The Economist, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He wrote the best selling biography of Elon Musk and created the Emmy nominated series Hello World. On Core Memory he travels the world to drop into labs, garages, factories, and hangars and spend time with the scientists, inventors, oddballs, and startups pushing the future forward.
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IN THIS EPISODE
Vast:
https://www.vastspace.com/
Haven-1:
https://www.vastspace.com/haven-1
Haven-2, Vast's proposed ISS successor:
https://www.vastspace.com/updates/vast-announces-haven-2-its-proposed-space-station-designed-to-succeed-the-international-space-station-iss
Drew Feustel joins Vast:
https://www.vastspace.com/updates/vast-welcomes-veteran-nasa-astronaut-dr-andrew-j-feustel-as-its-newest-human-spaceflight-advisor
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Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:31 Who's Paying a Billion Dollars for This?
05:14 Why Vast Builds Everything Itself
07:43 Touching the Real Haven-1
10:12 Space Food Taste Test with an Astronaut
12:49 The Biggest Window to Ever Fly
14:10 How Do You Sleep in Space?
15:59 Is This Really Big Enough for Four People?
20:07 Is Vast Actually Going to Pull This Off?
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