SpaceX's new Gravity Space Station Rapidly Progresses toward Launch Sooner Than You Expected

In just a few months, a brand new space station module will leave Earth on a SpaceX Falcon 9. And when it does, it won't just be another payload reaching orbit. It will be the beginning of the most ambitious space station ever built. Much bigger than the aging ISS. More advanced than China's Tiangong. And the first in history designed to give astronauts something no station has ever offered. Gravity. That station is Haven. And vast space is closer to the finish line than most people realize. By the way, today is my birthday, so if you enjoy the channel, hit subscribe and help me get one step closer to my first Tesla. Thanks! This is the story of Jed McCaleb. You might know him as the co-founder of a cryptocurrency exchange. But like Elon Musk, he had an unconventional vision. Instead of waiting for government funding, he decided to bet almost everything he had on a single dream. Building the space station that could one day replace the ISS. So far, that gamble seems to be paying off. Vast is led by CEO Max Hayat. And neither of the company's two top leaders came from traditional aerospace engineering. Yet in less than five years, they've grown the team from around 200 people to more than 1,000. And built exactly what NASA needs right now. But they weren't trying to build another aging government-style space station. Their goal was far more ambitious. They wanted to build a five-star hotel in orbit. Yes, it sounds a little crazy. What makes Vast truly different isn't just the vision. It's how they execute it. They build almost everything in-house. They design their own hatches. They roll and weld their own aluminum structures. They integrate their own thermal control systems. Even the control moment gyroscopes, the devices that keep the station precisely oriented in space, are developed internally. As the company likes to put it, we build them in six months. Competitors are buying at 55 million euro. Our internal cost is less than 5 million. Who do you view as your main competitor? Time. That's it. Just time. Because for a company that didn't exist five years ago, the clock is the only thing standing between them and the rest of the industry. And their first answer to that clock is already taking shape. Haven 1. The first module. A sleek white structure weighing around 14,000 kilograms. Currently sitting inside Vast's facility in Long Beach, California. Already 80% complete. With launch scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. Once it leaves the ground, it will become the heaviest payload ever launched on a Falcon 9. SpaceX and Vast signed the launch agreement in May 2023, just two years after the company was founded. The station offers 45 cubic meters of pressurized living space, roughly the size of a single-decker bus. About the same as one module on the ISS. That's not a huge amount of room. But Vast was never trying to beat the ISS in size. The real goal is harder than that. Prove that a commercial company can build and operate a space station safely, on schedule, and at a fraction of what governments have spent doing the same thing. The first launch will be uncrewed. That's how Vast plans to validate every critical system in the real space environment. Not just inside test facilities on Earth. Only after weeks or even months of on-orbit verification will a crew Dragon dock and bring astronauts aboard. But throughout that entire period, Dragon has to stay attached. It can't undock. It can't leave. Why? Because Dragon isn't just a transportation vehicle. It's also the station's lifeboat. No one, not even Vast, knows exactly how the world's first commercially developed space station will behave during its first months in orbit. Keeping Dragon docked gives the crew an immediate way home. If anything goes wrong. Fortunately, that's hardly a problem for SpaceX's current fleet. The company now operates nine Dragon spacecraft in total, including five crew Dragons, three cargo Dragons, and the experimental vehicle C-205. Even if one crew Dragon remains permanently docked to Haven 1, SpaceX still has more than enough spacecraft to support the ISS alongside its growing list of commercial missions. That's why the Vast SpaceX partnership isn't taking resources away from the ISS. It's an ecosystem where both companies benefit. But keeping Dragon docked introduces another challenge that rarely gets discussed. Fuel. Dragon relies on chemical thrusters for orbital maneuvers. If it were constantly using those thrusters to reboost Haven 1, counteracting orbital decay caused by Earth's thin upper atmosphere, it could eventually burn through the fuel it might need for an emergency return to Earth. That's exactly why Vast is developing its own propulsion system. And the type of thruster they chose matters. Unlike conventional chemical thrusters, which burn propellant in a combustion reaction, a Hall effect thruster works differently. It ionizes a gas, typically xenon, and accelerates those ions using an electric field to generate thrust. Less propellant burned per unit of thrust. The same fuel lasts significantly longer. Vast's version, based on NASA's H10 design, has already been tested in a vacuum chamber and achieved a specific impulse above 3,000 seconds. Roughly two to three times more efficient than what Dragon carries. Combined with Impulse Space's SIFE chemical thrusters and six in-house control moment gyroscopes for attitude control, Haven 1 can maintain its own orbit without drawing on Dragon's reserves. The ISS handles this by relying on visiting Progress and Cygnus spacecraft to deliver propellant and periodically raise its orbit. Haven 1 is being designed to handle most of that work itself, quietly making it one of the more consequential engineering decisions of the entire program. But Haven 1 isn't just an engineering problem. It's also a place people will actually live. What's it actually like to live aboard Haven 1? If you've ever watched footage of astronauts eating on the ISS, squeezing vacuum-sealed meals out of plastic pouches under harsh fluorescent lighting, Haven 1 is going to feel like a different world. During an interview at Vast's headquarters, former NASA astronaut Drew Feustel, who spent 225 days aboard the ISS, described what mealtime is really like in orbit. On the ISS, we trade food with each other. My favorite was duck confit. A German astronaut had it because Lufthansa made it specifically for him. Think about that for a second. A barter economy on a $155 billion space station. It's funny, but it's also a symptom of an infrastructure that was never designed with the human experience in mind. Vast hired a former Campbell's food chef to completely rethink how astronauts eat in space. When reporters sampled Haven 1's menu at headquarters, one of them tried a vegetable curry with rice and said, From freeze-dried tiramisu to caramel apple granola. But this isn't just about taste. Astronauts have almost no control over their daily lives in space. Their schedules, experiments, and sleep are planned down to five-minute increments. Meals are one of the very few things they can actually look forward to. Vast treats that seriously. And then there's the spoon. Vast redesigned it specifically for microgravity. The handle is longer so astronauts don't have to reach deep inside food pouches. The tip is flatter, making it easier to scrape every last bit from the corners in zero gravity. A spoon redesigned from scratch. Because every inconvenience, no matter how small, is a design problem worth solving. But the most breathtaking feature isn't the food. It's the view. Haven 1 includes a 1.1 meter domed window. The largest panoramic window ever flown into space. Not a tiny porthole. A true glass dome. Astronaut Don Pettit recently had the chance to experience it firsthand. And by all accounts, he loved it. Which makes sense. Who wouldn't want to sit in front of a glass dome and watch Earth turn beneath them? And the interior? It's described with a phrase you'd never expect to hear about a space station. Scandinavian chic. Warm Earth tones. Adjustable lighting. Private sleeping quarters for every astronaut. Inflatable sleeping bags that can be pressurized to create the sensation of gentle body support while resting. And Starlink. In orbit. So if an astronaut wants to unwind with Netflix after a long day of experiments, they can. At this point, Haven 1 isn't trying to feel like a traditional space station. It's trying to feel like an orbital home. But that raises the obvious question. Can Haven 1 replace the ISS? No. Because it was never meant to. Haven 1 isn't designed to replace the International Space Station. It's designed to prove that Vast is capable of building its replacement. One is a destination. The other is a proof of concept. And right now, the proof of concept is what matters. With 45 cubic meters of habitable volume, and a planned operational life of about three years, Haven 1 will support no more than four crewed missions. Each lasting roughly two weeks. No permanent crew. No continuous operations. But if Haven 1 reaches orbit, validates its systems, welcomes astronauts aboard, and brings them home safely, Vast will have something no competitor can claim. A real operational commercial space station. A proven track record. And in the race for NASA's commercial LEO destinations program, expected to select one or two stations to succeed the ISS, with a decision in July 2026, that track record might be worth more than any proposal on paper. First to orbit. First to prove it. That's the entire strategy. If it works, the next chapter begins with Haven 2. The first module launches aboard Falcon Heavy in 2028. At 16 meters long, it's already 60% larger than Haven 1, and carries two docking ports instead of one. Between 2029 and 2030, three more modules follow and connect. Then the centerpiece. A massive 7 meter diameter core module launched by Starship, tying the entire station together with a fifth docking port and a dedicated EVA airlock. By 2032, Haven 2 is expected to offer around 510 cubic meters of habitable volume. More than 11 times larger than Haven 1. A robotic arm. A 3.8 meter cupola window. But there's one thing no space station has ever achieved. Artificial gravity. It sounds like science fiction. For Vast, it's already in the test plan. The simplest way to picture it. Imagine sitting in a car taking a sharp corner at high speed. You feel your body pressed against the seat. That's centrifugal force. And to your body, it feels similar to gravity. The same principle applies in space. Spin the station, and centrifugal force pushes everything outward. Astronauts standing along the inner wall would feel as if gravity were pulling them toward the floor. No one has ever tested this with a crewed spacecraft. Vast's approach is clever. Instead of spinning Haven 1 alone, difficult and risky for a single module, they'll leave it docked to Dragon and rotate the entire combined structure end over end, like a baton spinning around its center. Because the combined Haven 1 and Dragon form a much longer structure, the astronauts farthest from the rotation axis will experience the strongest centrifugal force. The target? Roughly one-sixth of Earth's gravity, the same as the Moon's surface. That's nowhere near Earth's gravity. But it would be something no commercial astronaut has ever experienced before. And the data from that experiment could shape the future of long-duration spaceflight. Vast's ultimate vision is a rotating station nearly 100 meters long, built from multiple 7-meter diameter modules launched by Starship. The entire structure rotating at about 3.5 revolutions per minute, enough to produce something close to Earth gravity. Astronauts could walk normally, sleep normally, live normally in space for as long as they need. No bone loss, no muscle atrophy, no vision problems from months in zero gravity. For the first time in human history, space wouldn't just be a place we visit. It could become a place we actually live. So, would you want to live aboard Haven even just once? If yes, drop a Go Haven in the comments. Until next time.