Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Space Station Acceleration with Vast CEO Max Haot 5/16/24

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Just two years after its founding, startup Vast is one of several startups aiming to put the first commercial space station into orbit. The startup is developing Haven 1, aiming to launch it next year. CEO Max Haot joins Morgan Brennan from the 2024 Space Symposium to discuss his company’s ambitious plans, creating gravity in space, and its partnership with SpaceX.

VAST is moving fast. Just two years old, the startup has an ambitious plan to put the first commercial space station in orbit, even as others compete to do the same. VAST is developing Haven One and plans to launch it next year, with the first private astronauts scheduled to arrive just months later. VAST is not one of the companies that was awarded first-phase funding from NASA to develop a replacement for the International Space Station, what's called the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destination, or CLD program. But what it lacks in government dollars, VAST makes up for in private funding, thanks to its deep-pocketed founder, Jed McCaleb, crypto and internet entrepreneur. VAST CEO Max Hout says the plan, though, is to work with NASA, and the timeline,

which leverages partnerships with SpaceX, is the way to make it happen. So we are fully funded without any additional folks. We're funding all the way through that mission, including the Dragon flight. And our view is that if we can do all of this before the CLD, before NASA selects its partner, and obviously Congress and the Senate and the White House, we would be very hard to ignore because all of our competitors are talking about doing it. None of them are planning before the selection to actually build and launch a space station. They are waiting for the sole selection.

They are waiting to win the NASA contract. So that's our key differentiator. We are the only one with the key stated objective and the resource to do it, to make it all happen prior to the selection. On this episode, an in-depth conversation with VAST's CEO Max Hout from the company's display booth at last month's space symposium about the ambitious timeline, the vision to create gravity in space, and how VAST is leveraging the hardware of SpaceX to accomplish all of it. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space.

Joining me here at the Space Symposium, Max Haut, CEO of VAST. It's so great to speak with you. Yeah, great. Thanks for having me this morning. So I just, I really want to start at the beginning and just tell me a little bit about what VAST is doing. So VAST is a space station builder. Our ambition is to build the best and largest space station, I guess, in the universe. And we have a roadmap and an ambition to build the world's first artificial gravity space station. This space station will leverage Starship to build seven, to launch seven modules that are assembled in space into a stick that is 105 meter long, seven meter in diameter, and rotate end over end as a stick at four rotations per minute.

And if we do that, if we achieve that, we will have 1G artificial gravity on either end, microgravity for science and experiment in the middle and then a different point of the station you would have also mars and moon gravity and so we believe that for humans to become a space-faring civilization and to live in in space we need to resolve the problem of artificial gravity so that's our long-term vision or probably take, 20 years to get there. And on the way to get there, we've built a roadmap of a stepping stone. One of them is Haven 1, our first space station. And I do want to get into the details around Haven specifically, but this is fascinating to me. How big would a space station need to be to

simulate all these different versions of gravity? So the rotation speed is an important factor. Obviously this has never been done and we don't know how the human will feel. There are Coriolis effect and other reason why it might not feel great to rotate too quickly. And so our engineers and in general, the research community and artificial gravity, believe that at four rotation per minute,

it might be comfortable. And so the length of the station dictates the rotation speed for a given artificial gravity level. So for 1G, we need 105 meters, which is longer than the current ISS. So this is a very ambitious infrastructure that's never been built in space. But again, it's not our first step. Our first step is a microgravity minimum viable product space station called Haven 1, which we plan to launch at the end of next year. And if we succeed at doing that, we will be the world's first commercial space station. Many people have claimed this title. No one has done it yet. And we believe we are the forefront of that race to make it happen.

It's interesting to hear you say the end of next year for Haven One, because to your point, there are even just here at the Space Symposium, there are a number of companies that are working on space stations, commercial space stations. So how are you able to do this that quickly? So firstly, you might notice a contract from NASA called Commercial Leo Destination that is aimed at the replacement for the ISS when the ISS is retired. It started two years ago with some of our competitors winning a first phase and VAST wasn't there, didn't apply. So all of that to say we were

late to the race. We were founded two years ago and about a year ago we started to think, you know, this is our roadmap for the next decade, the artificial gravity space station. What is our priority for this decade? And our number one priority is to win that solicitation from NASA and to become the winner of that CLD solicitation. And so once we decided that, we were thinking, OK, but how we late in the game, our competitors have already won the first phase. How, you know, how can we improve late in the game. Our competitors have already won the first phase. How can we improve our chance of winning? And our conclusion was to leverage one of our unique aspects, is that we were founded and funded by a single investor and founder,

Jed McCullough, an entrepreneur, both in internet and crypto. And with that funding, we decided to create HavenOne. And HavenOne, the goal is to not only build, launch, and operate an actual space station in orbit, we have a launch partnership with SpaceX to launch it, but also a Crew Dragon on contract to bring four people to it three months after. And so we are not only building it and launching it

and being capable of having human, but having a Dragon with a crew of four, four customers visit it, be there for about two weeks and return safely. And so, you know, because of our funding situation, we realized that we had the funding. And so we are fully funded without any additional funding all the way through that mission, including the Dragon flight. And our view is that if we can do all of this before the CLB or before NASA select its partner, and obviously Congress and the Senate and the White House, we would be very hard to ignore because all of our competitors are talking about doing it. None of them are planning before the selection to actually build and launch a space station. They are waiting for the source

selection. They are waiting to win the NASA contract. So that's our key differentiator. We are the only one with the key stated objective and the resource to do it, to make it all happen prior to the selection. I mean this is incredibly ambitious. How confident are you that you can actually do this and actually have astronauts onboard the station in, what, the next year and a half? Well, the first step is to secure amazing partnership to help us.

So SpaceX is a key element. And it's a launch partnership, but in order to do it so quickly, it's very ambitious. One of the key difficult systems is the life support system. And so we took a unique approach where we are leveraging Dragon's life support system as much as we can and we are only adding the system on our station that are not in Dragon. So that's a way to simplify the scope of our first station. The other part is we partnered where we could and one of our partnerships is in propulsion with Tom Mueller's new company, Impulse.

And Tom, when he speaks about the Haven mission, so he's providing us 48 thrusters for attitude control in the orbit in all of the tank. And when he speaks about it, he's very excited about it because he will be providing every single, he will have designed every single engine in this mission. The Merlin engine for Falcon 9, the Super Draco engine for Dragon, and then all of the thrusters on Haven 1. And then lastly, it's building an incredible team of engineers and scaling very quickly. So we are in Long Beach. We have about 130,000 square feet facility, manufacturing, control room, integration, testing. And to give you a sense of how quickly we are going, last year we started the year at 30 employees. So in 2023, we are now at 350, adding about 10 to 15 people a week. We'll be about 650

at the end of this year. And by the time we fly at the end of next year we will be about 800 people. So you're welcome to visit us in Long Beach. But it's moving very very quickly. Right now the primary structure is in sort of the aluminium shell of the space station is in fabrication, but by about July our partners, customers and team will be able to see a full primary structure of Haven 1. It will be tested. We'll build a few of them to test them and qualify. And then by the end of this year, we'll be integrating it for testing mid next year and launch.

Wow. So I want to go back to something you said before and what sort of implied there. And that is that perhaps part of the reason you're able to move as quickly as you are is because you're actually not contracted yet with NASA. And I wonder if that's a fair comment to say. And I also wonder, as you do move through this process and as you do look to ultimately win one of those contracts or win the contract in the coming years if you are working lockstep with NASA in the meantime. So while we didn't win the CLD phase one solicitation that was about a $150 million contract for each of our competitors that are there, we didn't win because we didn't apply and we were not around. We did win a contract called CCSC2 by NASA. And what it is providing us is access to all the same data, all the same technical exchange meeting, and the supervision of NASA throughout

our development of Haven 1. So every quarter, the NASA team comes to observe our progress. But more importantly, they are part of our preliminary design review and critical design review for Haven 1. And we solicit their help on everything from life support design to which orbit should the station be in, what communication system we should have, how should we design our batteries. So our number one goal, you know, we would love to actually have Haven 1 as a NASA certified space station. It's not by design.

It's just a situation. But our number one goal is to make sure that all the subject matter experts are comfortable with what we're doing or supporting it so that for Haven 2, which we hope will be our NASA-certified space station for the CLD contract, they're already familiar with every system and don't have concerns. So while it's not formal as an approval, it's definitely our objective to operate in this way and get their support. Okay. I want to get into the communications piece because you made an announcement just this week about that.

But first, the astronaut piece of this. Are you selecting the astronauts? Are you working with NASA on the astronauts? What does that look like? So firstly, we have two astronaut advisors, and they both are incredible career at NASA. So Garrett Reisman was our first advisor. He not only flew on the shuttle and is a repeat astronaut. I think he's been in space for about a year, EVA as well, but he worked on the Dragon program for about 10 years in the commercial sector and was part of

this process of a crewed spacecraft being approved by NASA with the expertise from an astronaut. And more recently, we also secured Drew Fusetel, which was the acting head of the astronaut office at NASA. He repaired the Hubble telescope and he was a more recent NASA astronaut. So both of our advisors are part of the design and are also available to our customers if our customers would like a commander with experience. In terms of the customers, we haven't announced any of them yet. We are in negotiation with space agencies and private party. Our deadline is to announce it by January next year, basically to have enough time for the training. Our number one goal is to secure

sovereign astronauts. We cannot have NASA astronauts because we are not NASA certified, but because Haven 1 is designed to impress NASA and the US government to trust us for the CLD contract, we are prioritizing foreign space agencies and professional astronauts above private individuals. Having said that, we don't really believe in space tourists. We believe that even though there are private individuals in the market, every single one of them that I've met to date and that has flown are more explorers interested to further space exploration. They are not tourists.

And so we also talking to some of these and we might end up flying one or more of them and we'd be happy to do business with them so long as they want to do important work for space exploration. But if we, you know, if we could decide who it is, it would definitely be foreign space agencies. So let's talk communications, because speaking of SpaceX, you did just announce another partnership with SpaceX. So the way I personally think about communication is that after safety, which is obviously the number one most important feature of any space station. I personally believe it's number two.

I haven't had the chance to go to space myself, but in an isolated environment, if you could be connected as if you are at home to do anything, obviously most importantly, payload and science should have access to great connectivity, but also outreach and communication, and also the experience when you're on your downtime,

and maybe you want to speak to your family, or you want to do a Zoom call with your colleagues, or maybe watch some movies. And so our objective with Avon One is to have the best communication possible. And we've analyzed the market, and our belief is that for this decade at least the Starlink constellation is likely to be the best option ahead of everyone else and so we've been working for about a year trying to convince SpaceX to allow VAS to be the first customer to be able to put laser communication on Haven 1 that connect directly with the Starlink constellation of now more than maybe 5,000 satellites by today. And this

would give us continuous coverage on orbit at gigabits per second speed. So this is unprecedented. Also it's not only speed but it's low latency. The current solution on the ISS uses a satellite from NASA called TDRS or a couple of satellites they're pretty high speed but they go all the way to geostationary orbit and that makes that that creates high latency which makes it very difficult to use the normal internet and so with Starlink we will not only have an unprecedented bandwidth to do live video streaming we have 20 cameras on Haven 1 we will be able to stream all of them live if we want. But we will also have low latency, which will give an internet experience

to our crew using their device with Wi-Fi, which is exactly the same as on the ground. And so we're very excited about that, but also our potential customers, including NASA, are very excited because they realize, they understand that connectivity is a key feature of space flight. And also for the payloads, on Haven 1, we have 10 mid-deck locker, which are the same type of payload interface

that the ISS have. ISS has more of them, it comes from the shuttle era. And so our customers will have also gigabit speed connectivity to maybe put camera inside their payload experiment, get data, an unprecedented amount of data that usually on the ISS, they are more restricted due to the cost of the current solution and the latency. So crew aside, do you have customers for this microgravity research? We have LOIs and contract renegoti negotiating, but no one we've announced yet.

But yes, that's the next step. Okay. And so looking beyond Haven 1, assuming everything goes according to plan, Haven 2 and beyond, what are the business cases for microgravity, for simulated Earth gravity, for lunar and Martian and beyond. So, you know, right now the space exploration, so sending human and the payload research market, you know, are mostly government driven, maybe 100% government driven or subsidized. And so our goal is to turn this into a commercial profitable industry.

And, you know, we believe that it will into a commercial profitable industry. We believe that it will take a few stepping stones. From our vision in 2028, when hopefully we will win and we'll be thankful to win our NASA contract and launch our first NASA certified station, Haven 2. We expect NASA to still be the anchor customer, not 100%, but still a meaningful amount to create a great base of business. We expect our second customer to be international government and private individual. We expect that to be about 30% of our revenue this decade. We hope that next decade, all our revenue will be both private individual and in space manufacturing.

I mean the full industry is very excited at the potential for a killer application in manufacturing. You know, at a point where you can make something in space, return it to space and sell it for more than the whole mission. This is where suddenly the number of space station and everything will start accelerating. So we are not there yet. There are many companies, both anything from fiber optic manufacturing to pharma and other sectors that are starting and pushing.

And there's a lot of interesting experiment that have occurred. And so that we believe when we have a breakthrough there, sort of an AI moment before in space manufacturing, this is when the Leo economy or the lower 4-bit economy that we all speak about will really start to accelerate. So it's two steps. One is Haven 1 we are doing, that's also very important, our first mission we are doing with 0% funding from the government. Nothing from NASA, nothing

from the government. And so Haven 2 we hope will be you know more than that but definitely not 100 that our commercial approach will allow NASA to save money and will allow us to start the Leo economy in steps. Right, so I guess looking out 10 years, 20 years, where do you see VAST? So 20 years, we definitely need to have built the world's first artificial gravity space station. We didn't speak about Starship, but Starship for space station is a complete paradigm shift, given the volume that you can launch in one station, but also the mass and what you can put in that station. Would this even be possible without Starship? Well, Haven 1, yes, we're doing Falcon 9,

and that's because it's optimized for speed to be the first. I think the commercial model and starting to do higher volume at lower cost, Starship is one of the key reason why VAS was created, is seeing that opportunity, that there is a step change in what we can do in space station. And then artificial gravity, whether it's for people to live in space for more than a year.

Right now, if you go for a year in space or more, it's very, very difficult to the human body. We don't really speak about that. But we send professional astronauts that are as fit as athletes and one year later, they probably need nearly a year to recover from that. And the general public definitely is not really able medically to be in space for a year or more. So if humanity will be a space-faring civilization, which is our number one goal is to contribute to that, we need artificial gravity as a way to, you know, on transit to Mars or if we want to live and work in lower orbit. So that's our, you know, next 20 years we need to solve that problem and really get to the next level of space station.

This decade, it's really doing what has been already done. Space station have been built and operated, incredible one, the ISS. But our role is to do it at a much lower cost and much higher speed and to really unlock the market. Of course, we're bringing a lot of innovation in design and technology using all the latest, whether it's avionics or communication technology. But fundamentally, we are basically doing it five times faster, five times cheaper than governments around the world have been able to do so far.

So that's for now. And the next will be the size and the artificial gravity for the next decade. All right. Max Hout, Avast Space. Thanks for joining me. Thank you. Thanks for having me. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.