The End of the International Space Station Will Begin a New Era of Commercial Outposts
Human spaceflight is on the cusp of a fascinating new dawn. For 25 years, astronauts have lived and worked aboard the International Space Station (ISS), since its first occupants arrived on November 2, 2000. Built through a partnership between the United States and Russia in the aftermath of the Cold War, the ISS has experienced five presidential administrations, the advent and demise of the iPod and even the rise of another orbital habitat, China’s Tiangong space station. But the days of the ISS are numbered. By 2031, NASA plans to deorbit the space station. Citing aging hardware and rising costs, the agency will return it to Earth’s atmosphere for a fiery dive into the Pacific Ocean.
If all goes as planned, commercial space stations – outposts operated not by government agencies but by private companies – will take the place of the ISS to capitalize on its success. The first of these is expected to launch next year, with many more expected to follow soon after. All have the same goal: to foster a dynamic, human-centered economy in Earth orbit – and, ultimately, beyond.
“We hope to build habitats for the Moon [and] Mars and possibly even an artificial gravity space station,” says Max Haot, CEO of Vast, a Long Beach, Calif.-based company at the forefront of the private sector space effort. Vast plans to launch its Haven-1 space station as early as May 2026. Hot on Haven-1’s heels will be several other habitats from Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Starlab Space. All are intended to reach orbit by the end of the decade (and are still somewhat dependent on NASA as a paying customer).
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The ISS will leave behind an important legacy, said Bill Nelson, a former U.S. senator and space shuttle crew member, as well as NASA administrator from 2021 to 2025, and made official the timetable for the country’s pivot to commercial space stations. “The station has done incredible things,” he says, from discovering ways to live safely in space to exploring the promises and dangers of microgravity environments. Throughout this time, the ISS has been a beacon of global cooperation.
According to Nelson, NASA’s shift from “operator” of the ISS to “tenant” of space stations should help the agency focus on more innovative and daring explorations deeper into the solar system. “It’s part of the evolution of space,” he adds. “Before, everything depended on the government. Today we have commercial and international partners.”
Some have argued that the ISS could still have a long lifespan if it were propelled into a higher orbit, where it could remain intact for decades or even centuries. “I think it’s the most amazing thing humanity has ever built,” says Greg Autry, a space policy expert at the University of Central Florida. “It’s a bit like deorbiting Buckingham Palace. It’s an amazing historic structure, and it should be recognized for that.” NASA, however, determined that rescuing the ISS would be too costly and complex. Instead, the space agency opted to pay SpaceX nearly $1 billion to develop a vehicle that will push the station back into Earth’s atmosphere in 2031, leaving China’s Tiangong space station as the only government-run orbiting outpost.
By then, several commercial space stations could be active. Haven-1, the first of these, is a singular RV-sized structure that will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Initially built without a crew, the station will offer stays of up to 10 days to government and private sector visitors, all of whom are expected to reach Haven-1 via a SpaceX Dragon capsule. The cost of a private reservation is not disclosed at this time.
“Our main business model is 85% sovereign space agencies, including NASA, and maybe 15% private individuals,” says Haot. On board, four occupants will have private bunks with inflatable beds, a dome window for viewing Earth and high-speed Internet access provided by SpaceX’s Starlink service. An integrated science laboratory will allow them to conduct research at the station.
Haven-1 is the precursor to a much larger build planned by Vast called Haven-2, which is expected to launch around the time the ISS is abandoned. Haven-2 will include several Haven-1-style modules arranged in a cross shape to allow for continuous human presence in orbit rather than short stays like the one Haven-1 will host. It will be joined by the other commercial companies: Axiom Station, Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef and Starlab.
New priorities could emerge with any new private era in Earth orbit. While the ISS was nominally a science-focused station, private habitats will inevitably have a broader scope, ranging from the role of proverbial space hotels to that of manufacturing centers for imported goods on Earth. “You can make much better silicon crystals [for semiconductors] “[There are] many different economic factors that I think will eventually pay off,” and the space tourism industry “will be much bigger than most people think.”
Autry points to Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, which launches paying customers up and down on suborbital journeys lasting just 10 minutes, but has already carried about 80 people (including some regular customers). “There is a very high demand,” he says, saying that the increase in the number of trips to space and the destinations to be reached shows that space tourism can “absolutely” be as accessible as other extreme environments, such as the deep sea. “There’s no reason why you can’t get suborbital ticket prices in the thousands of dollars and orbital ticket prices under $1 million,” he says. “I think it will happen in the next 10 to 20 years.”
The role science will play in commercial space stations will depend, to some extent, on the tools customers can use on board. Major players have already suggested that an assortment of relevant and high-quality laboratory equipment will be the norm. Fabrizio Fiore, an astrophysicist at the Trieste Astronomical Observatory in Italy, says this means more opportunities for scientists to conduct research that was logistically impossible on the ISS. “Even if you put a little thing [the ISS] “It’s very, very long and difficult,” he says. “If we want to have space stations that are not dedicated to government astronauts, it will be much easier to build experiments on them.”
Research institutes and universities could also increase their access to space, perhaps by sending their own astronauts. Earlier this year, for example, Purdue University booked tickets for a 2027 flight aboard Virgin Galactic’s suborbital spaceplane for two of its researchers. It is not inconceivable to think that the same thing could happen to commercial space stations, especially if the cost of visiting them can be reduced to a reasonable level.
From a broader perspective, some see the rise of private space stations as a turning point in life itself. Caleb Scharf, an American astrobiologist, explains in his new book The giant step that space exploration is the next step in the evolution of humanity. “The ability to put objects into orbit around the Earth and study the Earth from space is this unique perspective that no other organism has ever had in the history of life on Earth over the last four billion years,” he says. “Entering space is another major evolutionary transition point. You can imagine that if we expand across the solar system in the coming centuries, it will induce fundamental changes to us as a species. It will dilute us. It will disperse us. We will undergo speciation. Even if we now call ourselves ‘humans’ as a single species, the future could be many species derived from what we are today.”
According to Scharf, commercial space stations could be the next step on that journey – but he’s not quite ready to buy a ticket – or generate the hype. “Maybe we’ll learn that commercial space stations are the best thing ever,” he says. “Or perhaps we will discover that this is not really the solution. It is entirely possible that commercial space stations, for economic or financial reasons, will not produce what is expected or hoped for.”
By the end of the decade, humans are also expected to return to the Moon in competing efforts, one led by the United States and the other by China. Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birkbeck, University of London, has previously argued that space stations could distract from this project. “To properly talk about space exploration, we need to move away from low Earth orbit,” he says. “How ‘space hotels’ in Earth orbit actually contribute to this, I don’t know.”
Whatever direction these new stations take, they will mark the end of a historic experience: a quarter of a century (and counting) of humans living and working off-world. This feat is all the more remarkable as it now seems banal: more than 40% of the world’s population is younger than the ISS and has never known a world without it. For many of them, the quiet technical triumph of the station’s uninterrupted orbital occupation is understandably mundane, boring and routine. Simply put, like so many wonderful things we take for granted, it seems that the ISS won’t truly be understood for its sake until it disappears.
