VAST

Revolutionizing space stations with artificial gravity. Our goal is to expand life and our civilization past a single planet out into the solar system and then beyond.

Created: 2022-02-06

Updated: 2022-02-20

Classification

Space Stations & Habitats

Category

Commercial Space Station

Fields

Artificial Gravity

Status

3) Development

First launch

?

The expansion of humanity beyond Earth is important for many reasons. People crave a frontier, and there is none greater than taking our first real step into space. Humans can perform assembly and repair tasks that robots are nowhere near being able to do. And, we need more resources and the room to use them without destroying our one biosphere—while Earth is finite and fragile, space is vast.
We’ve seen visions of large numbers of people living and working in space since the 1950s. But the high cost of launch has repeatedly brought those dreams down to Earth. Now however, that is changing. Launch costs have already come down two orders of magnitude . The impending availability of Starship and other next-generation launch vehicles promises to transformationally reduce the cost of launch even further, enabling much larger structures and grander visions than any current player is proposing. Everyone else is designing for legacy launch vehicles while we’re designing for the scale of what’s next.
When enough people are living, working, and playing in space, the game fundamentally changes: you can assemble huge structures, harvest space resources, repair satellites & space telescopes with human dexterity instead of finicky robots, and develop the vibrant space ecosystem that enables further expansion.
Space is still dominated by large government contractors with little incentive to take risks, resulting in calcified and expensive designs. SpaceX and other NewSpace companies have demonstrated that agility, first-principles thinking, and approaching problems at sufficient scale can drastically reduce the cost of operating in space. What they have done for rockets and satellites, we will do for human habitation, first in LEO, and then beyond. We have both the monetary resources and the talented team to achieve this vision.