Vast wants to expand humanity’s footprint into the final frontier, and it now has a lot more money to funnel toward that goal.
The California startup, which is developing a line of private space stations called “The garden,” announced today (March 5) that it has raised $500 million in new funding.
The financing consists of $300 million in “Series A” equity and $200 million in debt, according to Vast. (Series A funding is the round that follows the initial “seed capital.”)
The funds will be used to expand facilities, expand the team and advance the company’s proposed successor to the ISS, Haven-2designed to ensure continuous human presence in low Earth orbit for the United States and its allies,” Vast wrote in the statement.
Balerion Space Ventures led the funding round, with participation from IQT, Qatar Investment Authority, Mitsui & Co. Ltd, MUFG, Nikon Corporation, Stellar Ventures, Space Capital, Earthrise Ventures, and Jed McCaleb, Vast’s founder and first investor, according to the statement. AC Charania, current Balerion advisor and former NASA chief technologist, will join the Vast board as part of the transaction.
“Vast was founded with a long-term vision of billions of people living and thriving in space. Achieving a goal of this magnitude requires deliberate stepping stones, and our strategy of building, testing and iterating with real hardware is delivering,” McCaleb said in the same statement.
“It is exciting to welcome more investors who recognize Vast’s long-term potential and share our belief in making this vision a reality,” he added.
The The International Space Station is scheduled to retire at the end of 2030. Vast plans to launch the first Haven-2 module in 2028 and add a new module approximately every six months thereafter until 2032.
The company, which was founded in 2021, will get some practice before then: It is planned to launch the single module Haven-1 pathfinder station next year atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And NASA recently selected Vast to operate the sixth private astronaut flight to the ISS, which will launch no earlier than summer 2027 and use SpaceX hardware (a Falcon 9 and a Dragon crew capsule).
Vast has already tested some of Haven-1’s key technologies on the unmanned, 1,100-pound (500-kilogram) Haven-Demo spacecraft, which launched into low Earth orbit in November.
Vast is not the only company working to get a private space station up and running in Earth orbit.
For example, Houston-based Axiom Space plans to launch a handful of modules to the ISS starting in 2027; these modules will then detach and become a free-flying private outpost. Jeff Bezos’ Blue origin and Sierra Space is developing an outpost called Orbital Reefand a consortium that includes NanoRacks and Voyager Space is working on another known as Starlab.
