At the end of the decade, after more than a quarter of a century in orbit, the American space agency NASA plans to dismantle the International Space Station (International Space Station – ISS) to focus on deep space exploration, lunar re-flights, and even trips to Mars. The first ISS modules were placed in orbit in 1998, marking the beginning of the largest international cooperation in the history of space exploration. At an altitude of approximately 420 kilometers, the ISS orbits the Earth in about 90 minutes. This behemoth, weighing 400 tons and measuring 70 meters in length, will soon host its last astronauts and scientists as the year of its degradation, or dismantling, approaches. When that finally happens, low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes the next frontier for commercial space enterprises, which will have the support of NASA itself, which has stated that it will support private programs with grants promising to spark a gold rush in scientific research and tourism.
Tom Shelley, president of Space Adventures, a company that has been sending civilians to the ISS since 2021, says that in five to ten years there will be at least two private space stations in lower Earth orbit. And there are indeed candidates that could deliver that.
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Everyone wants to go up
Entrepreneur in the crypto industry Jed McCaleb founded the startup Vast Space, which, as he says, wants to be first on the launch pad. Already in 2025, the company plans to send the Haven-1 module into orbit with the help of Musk’s SpaceX, i.e., the Falcon 9 rocket. The plan is for the SpaceX Dragon capsule to be placed on another Falcon 9 rocket, which VastSpace will also rent for the occasion, and for that second spacecraft to dock with Haven-1 and unload the first four tourist astronauts who, as planned, would stay in the module for a few days.
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Haven-1 will be a modest three by ten meters in size, but Vast is also announcing a much larger, i.e., longer, ‘multi-modular rotating space station with artificial gravity’, which is expected to be as long as one hundred meters. This is confirmed by the company’s CEO Max Haot, who adds that Vast’s goal is to ‘solve the problem of artificial gravity and make science fiction a reality.’ Vast Space is not the only company that has gone crazy for space bucks. In addition to startups, there are established aerospace and military companies that are also trying to launch their stations into low Earth orbit. A good example is the American multinational aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman Corporation, which says it will start building its station as early as 2027. In the first phase, it should host four astronauts. There is also Voyager Space, headquartered in Colorado, which is teaming up with Airbus Defense to develop and build the Starlab space station and manage it. The apartments for astronauts on it will be designed by Hilton Hotels. They boast about it, but are branded apartments really needed there? You decide.
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A Mixed-Use Space
The list of companies does not stop there. Very ambitious Sierra Space, also based in Colorado, is in partnership with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Boeing, and infrastructure experts at Redwire to jointly launch the ‘mixed-use business space park’ Orbital Reef, which they hope to establish by 2027. It will feature a hotel, restaurant, and laboratories for product testing in microgravity.
So far, the furthest has gone Axiom Space, which sent its third civilian crew to the ISS in mid-January this year. The mission named Ax-3 launched on January 18 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule 18. The crew includes mission commander Ax-3 and former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, pilot Walter Villadei from the Italian Air Force, first Turkish astronaut Alper Gezeravcı, and backup crew member astronaut from the European Space Agency (ESA) Marcus Wandt from Sweden. Also, besides already transporting civilians to space, Axiom Space has teamed up with SpaceX, with whom it plans to establish a station by 2026.
Occasional and Temporary Adventurers
All these new space stations and companies seem to lean more towards tourist flights into space. So why should tourists only be counted in the summer when astronauts can be counted all year round? The luck (or misfortune) is that we do not have such companies here, because who could withstand the constant media counting of space tourists…
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However, as emphasized by NASA, tourism will always be secondary to government-sponsored missions.
– The space station in orbit is there 365 days a year, so operators must find the best business case – says Space Adventures president Shelley, emphasizing that ‘some developers do not care about private individuals, citizens, while others are very interested in them.’
Vast is in the other camp, says Haot, although he is annoyed by the term ‘space tourist.’
– These are private individuals who are true adventurers, more interested in further human understanding of space than in going to a hotel in orbit – he says.
However, in reality, these will be people who have excess money and who will enjoy sipping martinis in a space hotel looking down on Earthlings, as usual.
Big Plans
As mentioned, Axiom Space recently sent civilians to the ISS for the third time. This company, founded in 2016, is also responsible for the first civilian flight to the International Space Station in April 2021. Its second flight (Ax-2) to the ISS concluded an eight-day mission at the end of May with the landing and safe return of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and its four-member crew. In January 2020, Axiom received a NASA contract to build the first commercially produced module for the ISS. The company announces that its first model will be built and launched in 2016. Axiom’s first component of the station will connect to the forward port of the ISS’s Harmony module and serve as a springboard for the remaining parts of the space station architecture. Axiom plans to attach a second module in 2027 and a third one a year later. Finally, a thermoelectric module, planned for some time before 2030, will allow Axiom’s space station to detach from the International Space Station and become a free-flying, commercially operated destination in low Earth orbit.
The company states that these first three missions are just the foundation for future Axiom programs because they want their station, when the time comes, to provide maximum value to its travelers. One of the main goals of the initial missions to the ISS with a crew is to determine where that value will be, they add. The first missions also help lay the groundwork for Axiom’s future crew training programs. The company is directly receiving guidance from NASA on how to build a space station.
– We are working with NASA to ensure that we meet all today’s requirements of the International Space Station, so that we can assemble our modules according to them in the future. That is why we can be sure that we are designing our space station to be compatible with today’s standards – the company states.
A Cheaper Opportunity
Axiom is not the only company interested in the economy related to LEO. Almost two years after NASA selected Axiom to connect its space station module to the ISS, the space agency signed development contracts with three other companies we have already mentioned: Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman.
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Although space tourism is still in its infancy and many will have to wait a long time to end up in some space station or hotel, there are other options for space enthusiasts. These are, of course, suborbital space flights offered by companies like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic or Bezos’s Blue Origin. Such flights do not reach Earth orbit, usually last a few minutes, and allow passengers to experience a brief moment of flying in space. The price, of course, is a mere trifle, around $250,000. So who likes… However, it might be good to think about the risks before such flights. As Felix Baumgartner, the man who jumped from the edge of space, says, ‘there’s no way I’m getting into that rocket.’ When asked why, he says that tourists on such flights do not wear space suits and that a sudden loss of pressure in the cabin would take out everyone on board in less than a minute. When a guy who jumped from 39,045 meters says that, maybe he should be listened to and wait for safer and better times.
LOOKING FOR LUNAR GATEWAY New Station Around the Moon – for Travel to Mars
Probably the most anticipated future space station is the Lunar Gateway, which is coming as part of the Artemis mission aimed at returning humans to the Moon’s surface after 52 years. Artemis is primarily managed by NASA, but several other space agencies will also work on it, such as the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The Lunar Gateway will orbit the Moon and serve as a starting point for robotic and crewed exploration of the lunar south pole and for NASA’s concept for transportation to Mars ‘Deep Space’. The space station, which will be able to accommodate a four-member crew of astronauts, is planned to be launched in November this year.
