The retirement of the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled for 2030. With just six years left on the clock, private companies are racing to see their space stations reach low Earth orbit and become the world’s first ever commercial orbital laboratory.
At the 75th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) held in Milan, Italy on Monday (October 14th), US-based space habitation technology company Vast threw its hat in the ring. The company’s CEO, Max Haot, revealed Haven-2 as a proposed successor to the ISS. In an accompanying press release, Vast describes the Haven-2 private space station as the “next step in the company’s vision to pioneer a path to long-term living and thriving in space.”
“Our focus this decade is to win the NASA Commercial LEO Destination (CLD) contract and build the successor to the International Space Station,“ Haot said in a statement. “To achieve this, we will first demonstrate our capability by building and operating the world’s first commercial space station, Haven-1, to be launched in 2025.”
Vast has developed Haven-2, a NASA-certified version of Haven-1, to be modular so that it can be gradually constructed in low Earth orbit, like its predecessor, the ISS.
If Haven-2 wins the lucrative NASA CLD contract in 2026, the company expects the first Haven-2 module to reach low Earth orbit and become fully operational in 2028.
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Haven-2: Starting small
Following the deployment of this 16-foot-long initial unit, Vast said it would build three more modules and launch them within a two-year period between 2030 and 2032. Each subsequent module will not only expand the commercial space station’s volume, but also enhance Haven -2’s life support technologies and payload capabilities.
Haven-2 may be a commercial endeavor, but it is being founded with the potential for future international collaboration in mind. Collaboration has been something that has been crucial to ISS’s success.
“Haven-2 is being designed with compatibility in mind, ensuring that international partners can seamlessly integrate into this next-generation platform,” Vast advisor and 23-year veteran NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel said in the statement. “This vision of global cooperation in space will create opportunities for scientific and technological progress, benefiting new and existing sovereign partners as well as industries around the world.”
One of the ISS’s key roles during its now dwindling lifespan has been to allow scientists to conduct various experiments in the low-gravity or “microgravity” environment of low Earth orbit. Haven-2 will aim to fill that role with its laboratory module, which Vast said will offer state-of-the-art laboratory facilities to support a wide range of microgravity research and production in space that meet NASA’s basic laboratory capability criteria.
When Haven-2 is complete, Vast said some of its other key features will include a 41-foot-wide (12.5-meter) dome window that will allow private and spaceflight astronauts to see Earth and space and capture stunning images. Each module will also have its own 3.6-foot-wide (1.1 meter) windows, bringing the total number of Haven-2 viewing ports to 16.
On its exterior, Haven-2’s payload-hosting capabilities will include a robotic arm, docking capabilities for visiting vehicles, external payload airlock, and an extra-vehicle activity airlock for the spacewalks that have provided so much drama and wonder in the ISS’s lifetime.
“Vast’s design is expected to surpass all other proposed orbiting space stations in terms of volume, functionality and operational efficiency,” the company concluded in the statement. “With unmatched capabilities, Haven-2 will be the benchmark for next-generation space stations, economy in low Earth orbit.”