Commercial Space Stations: Orbit is Only the Beginning
If you build it, they will come. They all want to. However, getting those customers to commercial space stations might present a bit of a pickle.
It would be marvelous to see humanity spread among the stars.
Whether for government or commercial purposes, space stations are a step towards that vision. If space stations become common and affordable, humans can learn to live and thrive in them.
Moreover, their experiences will inform how humans can live beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, with humanity’s possibilities only limited by the universe.
However, there’s much to learn about building space stations. While organizations like NASA, Roscosmos, and the China National Space Agency have deployed and maintained space stations, those stations are still the alpha version of what it takes for humans to survive and be comfortable in space. Space stations are complex systems manufactured to shelter humans and provide a place to live safely.
Systems, no matter who builds and operates them, can go wrong. They take time and attention to detail to build. More is required to keep humans alive within those systems. Those efforts take more time. Then the space station must be “warranted” for years to decades (or longer) of operations. Unlike most rockets, a space station is designed for longevity.
Can commercial companies fulfill that longevity requirement? If the business that deploys and runs a space station doesn’t survive (for any number of reasons), does that help or hinder the vision of humanity moving to space?
Commercial space station companies hoping to attract business and people to their space stations should be ready to back up their hype with detailed, realistic, and implementable plans. But, more importantly, they should be ready for the long haul.
Can a startup that builds and deploys a space station within a few years from now provide that assurance?
YAASS! (Yet Another Announced Space Startup)
When another entrant throws a hat into the commercial space station field, it would be kind if that entrant bothered to answer a fundamental question: why? Why is the company getting into this challenging, undeveloped area?
In the case of newcomer Vast Space, its CEO, Jeb McCaleb, voiced his company’s mission:
“Vast’s mission is to enable a future where millions of people are living across the solar system.”
Fair enough, even if Vast’s mission is an ambitious one.
The U.S. company has joined the ranks of others with similar ambitions: Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Sierra Space, for example. Those companies also plan to operate commercially-run space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) and expand on those plans.
First, however, they still need to deploy a working commercial space station to LEO.
Even if these companies deploy their space stations, transporting humans to and from those commercial stations will be challenging.
Only one commercially-operated rocket/capsule combination is currently available: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon. While Soyuz is still used to transport cosmonauts and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), it’s unclear whether Russia would allow its use for wholly commercial endeavors as it has in the past.
The lack of an established commercial market is part of the challenge for commercial space tourism and commercial space station operations. SpaceX is slowly changing the human transportation part of the equation with its Falcon 9–very slowly.
During the past three years since its first Crew Dragon Demo-2 flight, three of SpaceX’s ten human spaceflight missions were commercial: 2021’s Inspiration4, 2022’s AX-1, and 2023’s AX-2. The other seven were conducted for NASA’s Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract.
The average annual launch rate over three years for passenger transport on a Falcon 9 is about three per year. Each year, one of those three has been a commercial flight.
For $2.6 billion, SpaceX flew NASA astronauts six times to and from the ISS; the last of the initially contracted flights occurred in early March 2023. Estimated per-seat costs on those flights range from $55 million to $67 million. While no firm numbers were provided for the Inspiration4 mission, Axiom’s AX-1 indicated seat prices were ~$55 million each.
To be clear, the possibility of commercially transporting humans through space is significant, even if the costs are unreachable for most of humanity.
However, the transportation challenges alone also highlight some issues with commercial space station plans.
Getting Customers to the Smol Market
The size of the budding market that commercial space station companies are attempting to bring into existence is small. As observed three years ago, should commercial space stations get fielded, they will be a subset of a subset of an already niche market. They fall under space tourism and research categories, which themselves fall under passenger transport.
That transportation relies on launch vehicles.
There aren’t many commercial space station competitors, either. Probably the most renowned is Axiom Space, a space station company with no space station yet. However, Axiom has transported people to the ISS twice.
Its competitors, Orbital Reef (Blue Origin/Sierra Space), Starlab (NanoRacks, Lockheed Martin, Voyager Space), Northrop Grumman, and Vast, among others, haven’t proceeded that far. Based on the history of business survival in the United States, one startup company (possibly two) will survive long enough to deploy a space station.
Add in high costs and the challenges to the human body in microgravity and space, and any optimism one might feel for possibilities brought forth by commercial space stations is tempered with a realization that these companies’ tasks are extremely difficult.
It’s not impossible, but keeping humans alive, functioning, and comfortable in space is a non-trivial accomplishment. Nevertheless, to do so consistently for decades, such as what’s been done on the ISS, is something NASA, Roscosmos, and its partners should be proud of. They’ve set the goalposts for future space station efforts.
Commercial space stations, a tiny part of the space industry, will take much work to manufacture and deploy. Getting humans to/from them and keeping them safe within will also be challenging. All will be expensive. But, transporting people to and from these commercial space stations may pose more of a challenge than initially thought.
Technically Viable, Market-Limited?
Challenge 1
First, just one operational commercial rocket, the Falcon 9, is currently available for transporting humans. SLS, Soyuz 2.1, and China’s CZ-2F have transported humans to orbit but are unlikely commercial U.S. space station passenger transport candidates.
Challenge 2
Second, the one company launching the Falcon 9 has a current rate of one commercial human transport mission per year.
Challenge 3
Third, there is one launch pad for passenger launches: Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A.
Challenge 4
And then there are the seat costs, prohibitive to most.
Those challenges have nothing to do with getting space stations in orbit. The Falcon 9 should be able to transport Vast’s and others’ space stations into their preferred orbits. It also may be that, by the time 2025 comes around, other commercial rocket launch providers will have rockets to compete for those launches.
But back in April 2020, Boeing was advertising it would launch its CST-100 Starliner with crews soon, and others were promising that the Ariane 6 and ULA Vulcan would be launching regularly soon, too.
Three years later and those optimistic visions are still visions. While the lack of other commercial launch vehicles and the listed challenges don’t impact space station deployment, they do impact the reason for their deployment: the operators’ customers.
Assuming successful space station deployments, more than one launch service provider might be ready to transport humans to them. But that is not the case now (see Challenge 1) and unlikely to be so in the next few years.
Suppose the proposed launchers from Arianespace, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) continue to experience delays. In that case, that lack pinches the existing customer supply for Axiom, Blue Origin, Sierra Space, Northrop Grumman, Vast, and other space station businesses.
That constriction poses an existential threat to those companies. If there’s very limited means to get more people to orbit, then what’s the point of deploying commercial space stations? If there’s a delay in deployments, startups with little funding will drop out.
No people on space stations mean no human-tended scientific experiments, no human microgravity research, and more.
As with the ISS, capsules might be necessary to dock with the commercial stations occasionally to push them to a higher altitude. (I’d be happy to be wrong about that.) Accomplishing any of that might require a steady supply of rockets transporting humans to the space stations.
But Challenge 2 demonstrates, at least for now, that SpaceX can only support a single commercial human spaceflight mission yearly. That cadence will likely need to change based on commercial space station business plans. It’s unclear whether the necessary changes require updating another launch pad aside from LC-39A for passenger space transport.
Vast has told the public that it will use a Falcon 9 and Dragon for its first crewed mission, Vast-1, in 2025. That mission will stay in its Haven-1 space station and might last up to 30 days. The Dragon capsule will be tied up with Vast-1 for at least that long. After that, according to Vast, it will conduct at least one other crewed mission to its first space station.
In the same year, Axiom expects to launch its habitation module to be attached to the ISS. Once it’s attached and ready, the additional residents will also require a Dragon to remain in place for their stay. That would be in addition to the crewed NASA missions SpaceX will conduct.
It’s not impossible for SpaceX–it has shown a propensity to delay its Starlink launches for those with paying customers. But what happens if/when other players deploy their space stations? Will this demand be higher than what SpaceX can handle? Will there be a market for ferrying customers to space stations?
A Lapful of Opportunities
If so, then SpaceX’s potential competitors are also missing out. Boeing’s antics with Starliner (and the billions NASA paid for its curious lack of performance) push the company further behind, making SpaceX the default company for crewed missions.
Other companies are in a similar bind. The Ariane 6 could potentially be used for crewed missions, with possible testing of non-crewed capsules by 2028. But that was before its latest slew of delays. And, of course, they are already well behind a competitor’s now-established system.
There’s no guarantee that Vast will be the company to deploy a commercial space station first, despite what its founder is stating.
With that noted, it might be helpful for companies with plans to operate commercial space stations to understand that they might stand a better chance of surviving if they deploy their space stations before their competitors. That way, they can justify taking up space on SpaceX’s already full launch manifest, maybe getting priority ahead of the competition.
At the same time, commercially-run space stations will be a small market, at least for the next decade or so, if only because of Challenge 3. They will rely on government contracts because the costs for a ride to a space station in addition to the costs to stay in a space station are so expensive, and mostly only governments can afford those expenses.
Governments will gladly pay those prices because they know, based on their experiences with the ISS, those prices will be a bargain (probably).
But as we’ve seen in Europe and the US, they are also prone to pick the companies they perceive as “winners,” usually going with the companies they know. Challenge 4, then, is possibly the easiest challenge to overcome.
However, Challenges 1 and 2 will be a bottleneck if these commercial space station companies successfully deploy their space stations according to their advertised timelines. Their success may put more strain on the supply of human-rated rockets.
And while SpaceX will undoubtedly attempt to gain these high-paying missions, it will also have to prioritize. It may also have to answer Challenge 3 to stay on schedule.
The commercial space station business appears to be heading toward the case of: building it, knowing some customers will come–but only if there’s a rocket available to carry those customers.
John Holst is the Editor/Analyst of Ill-Defined Space, dedicated to analysis of activities, policies, and businesses in the space sector.
Astralytical specializes in analyzing commercial space station concepts and the user market. Contact Astralytical for your space industry analysis and insight needs.