They have the most captive audience possible.

The medical industry has deep pockets.

Quite right, sir. Starlab will need a Starship or equivalent to deploy. Gravitics has also prototyped a hab module sized for Starship deployment. The central hub module for Vast’s stage 2 version of its Haven-2 station is also being designed for Starship deployment.

Beyond that, things seem likely to get very interesting very fast.

then the real fun starts in a few years when we can lift a Helion 50MWe fusion reactor into space

with fusion ISP there are 10^15 tons of NEOs we can round up and maneuver into HEO

spin up some nice near-gee real estate where people will want to live and we can sell millions of units

Could be. I couldn’t find any projected total mass for the Starlab station, but it seems unlikely to exceed the 70 tonne LEO lift capacity posited for New Glenn 9×4. The only sticking point might be whether Starlab would fit in the New Glenn 9×4’s payload fairing. That fairing is depicted as a hammerhead in concept art for the NG 9×4, but it may not be quite hammerheaded enough to handle direct sub-in for a payload designed to maximize use of a Starship’s cargo bay volume. The diameter of the fairing for the NG 9×4 is given, by Wikipedia, as 8.7 meters or 29 ft. Seems a potentially wasted opportunity not to go the full 9 meters to offer at least a volumetric match of Starship. Perhaps that will change by the time an initial flight article of NG 9×4 is ready to fly. In any case the diameter of Starlab is given as 8 meters so even the currently notional design of the NG 9×4 payload fairing might suffice.

But it’s an important building block for an eventual future where one *can*.

I reiterate my hope that at least Haven-2, Starlab, and Axiom really can get at least a baseline station into orbit, and operating, so that we at least have a chance to see how that might come about. Right now, all three companies are adamant that they need a NASA Phase 2 award to accomplish that. But perhaps, just perhaps, by some point in the 2030’s, a purely non-sovereign customer, or at least a purely non-NASA, space station business case could become a reality.