I don’t think anything said publicly by a company CEO can fairly be considered “rumor.”

As I post this comment, RocketLaunchLive still has the Haven-1 launch scheduled in May of this year.
https://www.rocketlaunch.live

I count that as being the latest announced (by press release) launch date. I’m not sure what we all would consider to be an official announcement, but I think that an interview is not as official as a press release announcement. It may be reality, or closer to it, but is it a rumor, or is it more than a rumor?

I grok that what they’re doing is hugely difficult and on a hugely accelerated timeline, and stuff happens. A failure of the station on orbit would be devastating, probably fatal for the company, so they need to be sure it’s really in good order. But yeah, I think it would have been better to just be up front and say that “2026” ain’t happening.

I make the delay about 9 months.

A possible motivation for Vast’s continuing with the mid-2026 story until recently is that this would have placed Haven-1’s notional launch in an earlier calendar year than that of Axiom’s first module. Now that Axiom has officially slipped its own initial module launch until 2028, Vast can now acknowledge a 2027 launch date for Haven-1 and still preserve that earlier calendar year thing. Both companies have, it would seem, been playing a game of chicken with schedules. When neither could keep up the pretense that their originally announced schedules would hold, first one, then the other, elected to acknowledge reality – or at least something closer to it. Venial sins at best in the space patch.

Richard M: It is actually a large schedule slide. Up until this interview, the company had been claiming it would launch in the first half of ’26. Now it is aiming for the first quarter of ’27. That’s essentially a year delay, as far as I am concerned.

As I noted in my post, I instantly thought they have been hiding this launch date, giving out a fake earlier date when they knew the launch would be later. I understand why startups do this, but I still think it is a bad look.

Of course, that could be spin. But either way, it’s a small schedule slide, so…