The World’s First Commercial Space Station Looks Like a Luxury Hotel Inside

October 10, 2024:

Aluminum for spacecraft interiors is passé; what space tourists want is wood. That’s the bet from Vast, the makers of Haven-1, the world’s first commercial space station set to be placed in low-Earth orbit by the SpaceX Falcon rocket next year. First paying customers will be getting on board in 2026, and judging by the final designs just released of the station’s cozy interior, they’ll feel right at home.

Helping to add softness to an interior previously more focused on function than style, Vast has used fine-grained maple wood—a contemporary favorite of home interior designers, chosen for its ability to add warmth and elegance to any space, and now space space.

Naturally, the maple wood slats are there for aesthetic appeal more than anything else, but Haven-1 has also developed other creature comforts, including a puffy space duvet that should help to encourage a good night’s rest—not something easily achieved in space.

“This is not just any old duvet,” says Hillary Coe, Vast’s chief design and marketing officer. “It’s a duvet that inflates, creating this equal pressure up against you which allows for a beautiful, comfortable night’s rest.”

According to Vast, the patent-pending sleep system is roughly the size of a queen bed, and should accommodate side and back-sleepers alike.

“Buzz-cut astronaut-dudes giggle when they come down to our office and see the sleep system—they’d loved to have had one [on their work-a-day missions],” says Coe, who spent five years as head of design at SpaceX before jumping spaceship to Vast. She’s also held design positions at Starlink, Google, and Apple.

Eyes on the Stars

Vast is a Southern California startup founded by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, a programmer who, in 2010, transformed his Mt. Gox card trading site into the first major Bitcoin exchange. He is worth $2.9 billion according to Forbes’ Billionaires List. McCaleb founded Vast in 2021 to develop artificial gravity space stations.

Early hires included Kyle Dedmon, former SpaceX construction vice president; systems engineer Tom Hayford who has worked for Relativity Space and SpaceX; Molly McCormick, a former SpaceX human factors engineer; and Colin Smith, a former SpaceX propulsion engineer.

“Earth has finite resources, but out in the solar system, there is an enormous untapped wealth, both in terms of energy and matter, that could support many ‘Earths,’” McCaleb told SpaceNews in 2022.

“Likewise,” he added, “mankind needs a frontier. Every prosperous civilization has had one to push off into—we haven’t had one for some time. Without a frontier, the world becomes a zero-sum game, which is detrimental to the psyche of a civilization.”

Similar to a certain other space-obsessed billionaire, McCaleb has his eyes on the stars.

“In terms of the long-term future of humanity, we will need to live off of the Earth eventually,” he says.

Placed in low-Earth orbit by the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, Haven-1 will be more of a high-class capsule hotel than an ISS-style space station but it’s nevertheless a serious research platform designed to offer long-term missions in comfort, not just a microgravity Hilton with free wifi and a stellar view.

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