Ranking the four private space stations under construction
the proposed Starlab space station
Yesterday NASA posted an update on the development of Starlab, one of the four private space stations under development or construction, with three getting some development money from NASA. According to that report, the station had successfully completed “four key developmental milestones, marking substantial progress in the station’s design and operational readiness.”
As is usual for NASA press releases, the goal of this announcement was to tout the wonderful progress the Starlab consortium — led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman — is making in building the station.
“These milestone achievements are great indicators to reflect Starlab’s commitment to the continued efforts and advancements of their commercial destination,” said Angela Hart, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program. “As we look forward to the future of low Earth orbit, every successful milestone is one step closer to creating a dynamic and robust commercialized low Earth orbit.”
I read this release and came to a completely opposite conclusion. While the other three stations have already begun building hardware, with one expecting to launch next year, the work described in this press release suggested that the Starlab consortium has built almost nothing so far. One of the milestones achieved involved doing a design review of an engineering prototype, but that isn’t the real thing.
Instead, it appears that the Starlab consortium is doing what Boeing did in developing Starliner. Boeing built nothing until it won its big NASA contract, even though that contract required the company to invest some of its own money into the project. Instead, Boeing did a lot of preliminary design work and dressed it up to make it look real in order to convince NASA to give it the Starliner construction contract.
It appears the Starlab consortium is doing the same. The NASA development contracts that it has so far awarded to three space station projects are relatively small. Sometime in the next year or so it plans to award a much larger contract for construction, to one or two of these stations. Starlab appears to be avoiding spending much money now in the hope it can win that big contract and have NASA pay for everything.
Considering how this strategy worked for Boeing, it makes me very skeptical of Starlab’s future. The consortium’s one saving grace is its partnerships with Europe, which might decide to save it because this is the station the European Space Agency appears focused on making its main orbital destination.
Thus, if I had to rank the state of the present stations under construction, this is how I would do it:
- Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, and plans to launch and occupy it next year for a 30 day mission. It will then build its mult-module Haven-2 station.
- Axiom, being built by Axiom, which has also launched three tourist flights to ISS. It is building its first module, though it is apparently experiencing cash flow issues.
- Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Though Blue Origin has apparently done little, Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building the station’s modules for launch.
- Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman.
We shall see how these rankings change in the coming years.
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Vast is the only one of these that has any chance of putting hardware in orbit, precisely because it is not taking direction from NASA. The others are more or less milking the NASA selection process.
“Starlab appears to be avoiding spending much money now in the hope it can win that big contract and have NASA pay for everything.”
In a press release broadcast via Starlink from Starbase, Starship inventor Elon Musk suggested that Starlab may have yet another, even more startling strategy, although it was not obvious exactly what it was.
Well, three things stand out about their strategy: 1) They are launching the entire station in a single launch, which means they can start getting a full revenue stream out of it immediately; 2) they are leveraging Starship’s 9m fairing to make that possible (Elon himself singled this out for mention in a tweet back on January 31); and 3) they are aggressively lining up customer interest and support in Europe, so they are not as dependent on a NASA contract to close their business case.
Whether any of that is what Elon has in mind, I don’t know. Like Bob, I like what Vast is doing the most right now; but maybe Starlab is worth keeping an eye on. Still, it would be good to see them start bending metal soon.
The first place ranking for Vast is the most certain of the four. Vast will certainly go after money from NASA and other governments, but will take it when and if it comes. In the meantime Vast is pushing ahead at flank speed to get hardware on-orbit. If it comes even passably close to meeting the schedule it has outlined, Vast should be able to overlap the first phase of its Haven-2 project with the last year or two of ISS operations and be ready to expand Haven-2 beyond ISS’s benchmarks in short order thereafter.
To Richard
I hope is is a Starship based megamodule–no inflatable anything.
Jeff Wright,
According to what I’ve read, Starlab’s main component is to be a 8-meter diameter “tin can” module to be built by Airbus. No inflatables. FWIW the central module of the Phase 2 version of Vast’s Haven-2 is also going to be an 8-meter diameter “tin can” which Vast plans to build itself. The entire Starlab station is supposed to launch on a single Starship mission. The central Phase 2 Haven-2 module is also to be launched on Starship. The other eight Haven-2 modules are to be launched on Falcon Heavies.
At an earlier (pre-Airbus) stage of development, the plan was for an inflatable architecture, and maybe that is what Jeff is thinking of. But that has gone by the wayside, especially now that Starship is an option.
Their website is full of renders now, including of the interior. The design has changed a lot since the early days, and I think that’s why they haven’t gotten to bending metal yet.
https://starlab-space.com/