How do you allow people to live at lower cost than they've done historically, and for much longer times in space? That's what Vast has set out to do. Vast is a company that has the goal of creating the first private space station. I didn't know anything about them a few years ago. And then all of a sudden they burst onto the scene with a very ambitious and aspirational timeline. Right now, Vast is 650 people. We add ten people every week. More than 70% of that is in engineering and manufacturing. Vast’s whole approach has the potential to upend the space industry. It also has the potential to go incredibly wrong and you can see a person light a billion dollars on fire. We are not really a space station company. We're an aspiring space station company until we have a space station on orbit. So you obviously have an extremely aggressive timeline. How do you make it so that you are launching in just a few years? We'll be doing it five times cheaper and five times faster than any other space station that has ever been built. We're investing $1 billion from our investor and founder, Jed McCaleb, to build Haven-1 to win the NASA competition to replace the ISS. NASA has officially decided that we are going to retire to the International Space Station by 2030. Through the Commercial Leo Development Program, NASA is working with industry partners to develop the first generation of commercial space destinations. What NASA wants is to cede that control over to commercial companies. NASA has decided to become a customer. Vast have taken the view that if we can get our product into space before anybody else, it's impossible for them not to give us a contract. Vast is a company founded in 2021 by cryptocurrency billionaire, Jed McCaleb. They hope to launch their first space station, Haven-1, in May of 2026. The plan is to launch the first module of their Haven-2 space station in 2028, that will then grow and expand into their final replacement for the ISS. So this is the actual design. This is what you can expect Haven-1 to look like. We can thank one of our advisors Peter Russell-Clarke, which was for 25 years a designer at Apple. Jed McCaleb has been very upfront that it's going to cost about a billion to get Haven-1 into orbit by 2026 and he's committed to putting his own money into that. That is essentially dropping half of his net worth into this company. I don't need this much money to live. My choices are like, buy a lot of yachts or whatever, like a lot of people, billionaires do. That isn't very interesting to me. Like what's interesting is actually like building things and like, actually changing the trajectory of humanity, which I think we can do here at Vast. Vast has an incredibly ambitious timeline, having only been founded in 2021. And I wouldn't say that just for a space company, I'd say it for any company that's wanting to develop a product of this sophistication. But, you know, there are a lot of people who've gone and drank the Kool-Aid, or seen the potential, depending on who you speak to. Jed has no background in space. I've been a programmer for many years, like forever, since I was a little kid. One of my original things was a file sharing thing. And then in around 2010, I discovered Bitcoin. Jed is one of the most influential people in the crypto industry. Founded Mount Gox in 2010, which became one of the first bitcoin trading platforms. After about a year and a half, he sold a majority stake. Three years later, that company collapsed. Jed, though, was not done with cryptocurrency. He co-founded a company called Ripple, which was a new blockchain. At one point, Ripple was the second biggest traded token after Bitcoin. Jed subsequently left that company, but still held a lot of the currency. He then decided that he was going to sell that currency almost all at once, which basically crashed the platform. After a long, tortuous legal negotiation, it was agreed that there would be a trading plan where Jed could sell down his tokens over time. It is our understanding that those sales netted Jed at least $2 billion. McCaleb created Vast in 2021. Small crew, aspirations for building an artificial gravity space station. I think it's important that humans get off the planet and out into the solar system. People need a frontier, otherwise, things start to feel very zero sum. The first real moves were when he bought Launcher. Max Haot is an entrepreneur who started his own aerospace startup called Launcher that was developing a rocket and an engine, as well as created a few tests satellites. And they launched those satellites into orbit. But both of those satellites suffered some kind of failure once they reached space. This all raises the question if Vast is the one to create the next space station. Other companies in the industry certainly have more of a space pedigree than Vast does. For example, Axiom Space; their previous CEO ran the International Space Station. Vast haven’t done things that other companies have done in terms of putting in a viable product. Vast, at this point, is still essentially a giant science project. The International Space Station took years of planning, over a decade to build, multiple partner nations to work together to put it into space. For Vast, they've kind of gone from zero to 60 in a really short timeframe. And they still need to develop the vehicles, the complicated technology and the physics that all go into keeping humans alive on a space station in orbit. One of the key facilities, or the heart of our manufacturing capability and vertical integration, is the machine shop. So this is a team and the machine that turn raw material into parts of the shape we need to then integrate on Haven-1. This machine is a pretty big, big mill that can do large parts and it's literally sculpting. So you start with a big piece of metal and you basically carve it using a mill. This is probably one of the flight parts of Haven-1 that will go to orbit. This specific part will take days to make. Yeah. Three days. How long do you think it’ll take? Yeah, around three days. Three days. If we purchase it, you know, maybe six months. And then sometimes you're chasing it and it takes eight months. There's been a recent vertical integration trend in the space industry led predominantly by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Rather than source your components, you build everything in-house. I'm assuming this is some kind of hatch. There's not a lot of providers or market for buying space station hatch. So this is a clear item that you need to develop in-house. Vast are hiring people every day for every unit across their industry. Like living legend - Drew Feustel. The man worked for NASA for 23 years, was the head of the astronaut crew. He actually worked on repairing the Hubble Telescope in space before he retired. So Drew accepting to come and work on Vast and help be a cheerleader for the company shows that he certainly believes that they have a real shot of producing a genuine product. Having lived in space for six and a half months, I have a good understanding of what works in space and what doesn't. So what we developed here for our crew members is what I believe to be a more comfortable environment to sleep in, a system that applies constant pressure over our bodies so that we can experience sleep that's similar to what we experience on Earth. I could fall asleep here. So a key technology we need as a space station company is the ability to handle micrometeorite strike that might happen. So small objects in low Earth orbit that can arrive and potentially create a safety risk for the crew. Right? Because just one tiny speck could.... Yes. And then after a strike like that you might have to abandon the space station. You might have to repair it. And this has been designed so that if a projectile arrives, let's say at five kilometers per second arrive, a certain size can puncture this layer. It reach this other layer. Yeah. And then you can see the back. This is a representation of this pressure vessel - was not punctured. I am definitely a skeptic when it comes to the space industry. You know, oftentimes, I'll joke that I'm a CGI reporter. The only thing that companies have to show are CGI of what they're going to build. I saw actual hardware. That is sometimes a rarity. Yeah, this is neat. In my opinion, this is the best part of the space station, right? Is getting to look out the window. This actual window there will go and be mounted on the qualification primary structure. And if you'd like, you can, you know, try it. Absolutely. It's the closest I'm going to get to space. So we don't have the vacuum of space outside you, but you can get a sense. Haven-1 is still in its relative infancy, but you can see money being spent everywhere at that facility. They're tripling their floor space at the moment. It's incredible to see the speed that they're working at. They want to save the time, not the money. So just to create this article, we created three times more than we needed. So that if we had a problem, we could quickly make another ring, for example. I see. Private industry needs to act fast. I would say comparing the cultures of NASA to any private sector company is really not an apples to apples comparison. Government tends to be much slower in decision making. It could be a very good thing that they're doing it this way. It could show other companies that you don't have to, you know, work out all the kinks before you can run, essentially. Or it could be a giant example in hubris. Eventually, NASA is going to select the finalists for the Commercial LEO Development contract in 2026. Many of the competitors of Vast have been working on their space stations for much longer. A big one is Axiom, Blue Origin, Voyager, and then Vast. The NASA CLD contracts could be very lucrative for commercial companies, potentially worth billions of dollars. So, for us, it's a matter of existence to win that competition. We don’t think that, without NASA as an anchor customer right now, the market is there for us to exist after that. And I think that goes to show just how valuable NASA contracts still are. So, as vibrant and as influential as the commercial space economy has become, NASA is still the biggest player in town. But when it comes to getting anything into space right now, SpaceX is kind of your bread and butter. And Vast has multiple contracts with SpaceX. It definitely caught the attention of the space industry. It's one thing to say that you're going to build a space station, and it's another to say, hey, I've actually secured a launch contract to build this station and a contract to send people to it as well. We obviously are a customer of SpaceX. You know, we pay them money to get us to our space station. But strategically and long term, we fully align with them. And we are all in on that relationship because we want to be joining them on their quest to Mars and we want to be contributing to that. Vast is leveraging various hardware that SpaceX has perfected over the last few years. The biggest one being SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. It’s the most prolific rocket in the world. And it's the main rocket that SpaceX uses to launch satellites and people into orbit. Haven-1 is designed to fit on top of one single Falcon 9 rocket. And then once that space station is in orbit, Vast will be using a SpaceX crew capsule to launch their own crew of astronauts to the Haven-1 space station to make sure it's viable and that it is working properly. We asked Jed and Max if they own Teslas, having seen them all over the parking lot. They both said yes, but Max drives the Cybertruck and Jed, you know, got a Model 3. So, make of that what you will. So, we’re going to see the actual article now. Yeah, the qualification primary structure. And right here. So this started as a flat panel. It was milled. It was rolled. And we looked at the window. So this metal piece is actually bolted in. So we are removing this. And then we are adding the window right there. So we can test the window in the pressure test. The one that we saw? The one that we saw. And then on the other half is where the hatch goes. And so then you have a full primary structure with the hatch and the window. Ready for proof testing. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now in terms of the future of NASA. There's a lot of concern that these space stations won't be ready by 2030. It's a very complicated type of endeavor, obviously dictated by very complicated physics. It remains to be seen exactly how that's all going to shake out. Vast is doing its own moonshot, if you'll forgive the pun, that it can put a space station in space within five years and the owner is willing to spend his own money to do it. If it works, it will be a testament to private endeavor. If it fails, he will have a lit of his own money on fire.