Vast Space satellite bus commercial space Haven-1 orbital infrastructure

Vast Space Wants to Sell You a Satellite Bus, Not Just a Space Station

19 May 2026

Vast Space, best known for developing the Haven-1 private space station, has announced it will now also manufacture high-powered satellite buses, leveraging technology developed for its station. The company's first product is a 15 kW-class satellite bus capable of operating from low-Earth to lunar orbit, with a launch of at least 10 satellites targeted for late 2027, and one customer already signed for up to 204 satellites. Vast is entering an increasingly competitive but rapidly growing market, betting that its existing $1 billion in manufacturing infrastructure and mature spacecraft technology can help it stand out.

Vast Space launched a small demonstration spacecraft in early November last year, put it through dozens of test objectives, and brought it home safely three months later. The mission was designed to validate technologies earmarked for the company's Haven-1 space station, and by all accounts it went well enough that Vast has decided the underlying hardware is good for more than just orbital hotels.

The Long Beach-based company announced this week that it will start selling high-powered satellite buses commercially. CEO Max Haot put it simply: every successful space company diversifies. The only question was timing.

The flagship product is a 15 kW-class satellite bus, roughly 3 metres long and 4 metres tall, weighing in at 700 kg with at least 350 kg of payload capacity. Design lifetime is five years, and the intended operating range runs from low-Earth orbit all the way out to lunar orbit. Target customers span telecoms, Earth observation, and data services. Haot also mentioned plans to offer an Nvidia Space-1 Vera Rubin Module for orbital inferencing workloads, because apparently that's a sentence we say now.

The bus architecture borrows heavily from Haven-1's design, which itself is due to launch later this year as the world's first commercial private space station. That said, satellites have different demands than space stations, so Vast is developing electric propulsion and a deployable solar array in-house.

The company already has its first customer signed for four satellites, with an option for up to 200 more. Vast is targeting a launch of at least ten satellites in Q4 2027.

The market Vast is walking into is increasingly busy. The traditional players, Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, Maxar, and the like, built satellites that were expensive, bespoke, and took years to deliver. That model has been under pressure for a while. The Space Development Agency's preference for distributed constellations, combined with cheaper and more frequent launch options via Falcon 9, shifted the economics enough to attract serious venture capital. A clutch of newer companies including K2 Space, Rocket Lab, True Anomaly, Blue Canyon, and Millennium Space Systems are all competing in the same space.

Haot's argument is that most of these competitors are still maturing, and that Vast's $1 billion investment in manufacturing facilities, including clean rooms capable of handling both stations and satellites, gives it an edge. Whether that confidence is warranted remains to be seen.

The broader numbers are worth noting. The global satellite population has ballooned from roughly 4,000 a few years ago to around 14,000 today, mostly thanks to Starlink. Some projections put the total at 500,000 within a decade, driven by communications, observation, and orbital compute. Haot expects SpaceX, Amazon, Blue Origin and similar heavyweights to account for around 90 percent of that. But 10 percent of 500,000 is still 50,000 satellites up for grabs. For a company that only just proved its hardware works, that is not a small opportunity to aim at.