Is a Commercial Space Station Possible? These Startups Are Racing To Be the First to Try It

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

Is a Commercial Space Station Possible? These Startups Are Racing To Be the First to Try It
Image courtesy of Orbital Assembly

No longer content with terrestrial life, a new cohort of CEOs in Los Angeles have turned their focus to the stars, with the ambitious goal of launching space stations that could host tourists alongside astronauts and researchers.

“I've always thought it was really important that people move off the planet and out into the solar system,” Vast Space CEO and founder Jed McCaleb told dot.LA. “There's just way more resources and energy available up there. And also it provides a frontier, and I think that’s important for our collective psyche.”


McCaleb, a billionaire thanks to his prior ventures co-founding cryptocurrencies Ripple and Stellar Lumens, launched Vast Space last year, with the belief that it can be the first company to create a space station for commercial customers that simulates gravity in space.

Why artificial gravity? For starters, the negative health effects zero gravity can have on spacefarers are myriad, including muscle shrinkage, cardiovascular deconditioning and blood loss. Not to mention, simulated gravity in space could ease the transition to low Earth orbit for consumers; allowing them to experience the cool, floaty part of zero G while eliminating the need for full astronaut training.

But Vast is hardly the only company eyeing space tourism. Another is Fontana-based Orbital Assembly, which plans to create luxury hotels in space. According to Chief Operating Officer Tim Alatorre, Orbital Assembly is gearing up for its first launch, which will carry a small portion of Orbital’s first Pioneer space station for research use by 2025. Alatorre told dot.LA “once we've proved that the station is safe, then at that point, we will bring tourists on.”

Alatorre likened the quest to become a space hotelier to the expansion of the American railroads, when transport companies opened up hotels to encourage travel.

“That's why we're focusing on [tourism], because we see that as a step to that larger vision of having thousands of people really living in space, whether it's in [low Earth orbit] or the moon, or Mars,” he added.

Each company plans to rotate parts of the space station to replicate gravity. Basically, spinning the station’s mechanics in opposite directions (roughly one revolution every minute and a half) creates enough centrifugal force to allow the station to remain facing the sun and mimics gravity.

According to McCaleb, Vast plans to have artificial gravity in parts of the station where people eat, bathe, work and sleep, but a central area where passengers can indulge in the zero-gravity experience temporarily. The El Segundo-based company’s plan is to assemble everything on the ground, prior to launch, since in-space construction is still in its infancy. Once there’s more of a demand for in-space construction, McCaleb said other companies could contract Vast to build and launch facilities for them.

“What we're building is an orbital machine shop, essentially, where you can design your thing on the ground, ship it up to the station, like an IKEA-style thing where we can snap it together for you,” McCaleb explained.

McCaleb said he is his company’s sole funder. He wouldn’t tell dot.LA how much he’s invested into Vast, or how much he expects the endeavor to cost. That said, for comparison rival company Orbital Assembly’s CEO Rhonda Stevenson told dot.LA last June the company at the time estimated it would need $200 million to launch by 2023.

McCaleb said he was aware of Orbital Assembly and “a handful” of other competing firms but claimed, “there’s no one else that’s actually trying to do it seriously.” He told dot.LA that initially, Vast won’t target a high-end consumer, but will focus on selling space station access to governments or private companies. Vast wouldn’t provide further details about a target launch date.

“We’re definitely not building some sort of luxury space hotel,” McCaleb claimed. “I think some of the first customers will hopefully be NASA and other national astronaut programs,” he added, hinting at partnerships with other governments.

Tarek Waked, an aerospace investor and founding partner at Type One Ventures, said he’s skeptical.

“Vast claims to be the first gravity-enabled station. I think they won’t be the first to [do] it,” he said, pointing to older companies like Gravitics and its competitor Axiom Space, which is based in Houston and debuted in 2016.

As things currently stand, however, Vast appears better-funded than Orbital Assembly. Orbital has only raised $2.4 million to date. But Alatorre said his company is in the process of raising another round, though he wouldn’t disclose details.

Neither space station project will be possible without launch partners, though. SpaceX’s upcoming Starship rocket and Boeing’s Starliner are two developing projects that could help Vast and Orbital launch both people and cargo to space.

“Elon [Musk] is talking about getting payloads to space for about one to $200 a kilogram, which would be game changing,” Alatorre said. “If we can get people to space for even a million dollars a seat that really starts to open up that market, and that's going to be really transformative.”

According to David Barnhart, director of USC’s Space Engineering Research Center, the real question is twofold.

“Can any of this be done at a cost level that allows a commercial company to make any profit, even if it's only billionaires that can do it?” He asked. And furthermore, once the technology is up and running, how many civilians will take the risk?

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The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All
Decerry Donato

As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is home to almost 5 million people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Yet, many feel they still lack representation in the city’s tech space.

“I can safely say that last year’s LA tech week hosted all of the events on the west side, and very few were focused on telling Latino and Latina entrepreneurial stories,” said Valeria Martinez, investor at VamosVentures. “We wanted to change that this year.”

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LA Tech Week Day 3: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

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LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

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