Vast Space raises $500M for Haven-1, the world's first commercial space station launching Q1 2027

that beautiful camera move. We got graphics. We got a I have the gong mallet here actually. But we will kick off with the first guest of our lamina lightning round, Max from Bath Space. Max, how are you doing?

Hey guys, great to see you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming on the show. Uh, give us the give us an introduction on yourself and the company first.

Yeah, I'm Max out. I'm the CEO at BAST. Um, so we are a space station company based in Los Angeles. Uh our short-term goal is to have the privilege of replacing the international space station for NASA and its partner. There's a competition this week this year uh that we we hope and expect to win. And our key differentiator is that we are not waiting to get the contract. We are building right now the the world's first commercial space station haven one that we are launching in Q1 next year. uh the team I have the privilege to lead is a thousand uh people that are mostly technician and engineer and um and we are getting on we're building it and after that we will be uh launching more module and basically creating a multiodule station that can ensure American astronaut but also allied astronauts are are able to be in space permanently China is out there with a permanent space station so we need to succeed it uh before the ISS is retired

how did you get into this

it's amazing first step by the way just start by

going straight for the space station.

Yeah. What were you doing before?

The uh So, I'm an internet entrepreneur originally. I I created a couple of companies that I've exited. One is called Liveream. So, live video is pretty similar to to familiar to me. Uh also a video camera company called MEVO that I sold to Logitech. Live stream was sold to IC Vimeo

in 2017. And then my my first space company was called Launcher. Uh it's a small launch company. We we launched two satellite. We built an amazing engine and then the founder of Vast Jed Mckelb acquired it in 2013. So at the time Vast had about 40 people and my team at 80. We became 120 and then we we embarked on the the current strategy and grew to know a thousand people and uh and obviously our first external fundraising that we are announcing today.

Yeah. Uh going after space station.

Wait, you said first external fund raise. Yeah. Give us the numbers. How much did you raise?

What's the fun what's the total history? So you guys had combined your team. Um so the the original uh investment were from our our founder jet. It's pretty unusual. It's it's over $900 million uh since 2001. And then today we are announcing our 500 million.

Thank you for the gunk. 500

break down uh break down what what the what the why we need uh new space stations what are the different use cases other than just having a strong presence

I mean today if you look at the international space station it's been there for 25 years it's been amazing in safety in keeping a continuous crew for 25 years and we've had people outside of earth for 25 years it's pretty amazing uh what it has not been great at is the cost you know it's a single most expensive object created by humans and it's not sustainable to the taxpayer or to the NASA budget which need to focus more on exploration including moon and Mars um as you read Jared yesterday or a few days ago uh and so the NASA basically wants to reduce the cost that's why they wanted to move to commercial provider uh and and they also need to retire the ISIS it's a partnership with Russia uh obviously not desirable geopolitically right now long term uh and it's also aging so all of these reason create the the commercial opportunity to succeed it. Uh short term, you know, the main business model are international space agencies, NASA, Europe, with JAXA and Japan and other nations getting involved in human space flight. Uh long-term uh it's the orbital economy. So it means manufacturing drugs, semiconductors and so on uh in space and of our space station will become more factories uh as opposed to government mission. But that will take a while. So today the the key opportunity is to help uh all the governments around the world get into human space flight to do important science and NASA and all the government to save money with a fast iterative lowcost uh approach.

Very cool.

Where are you able to partner with the existing orbital economy the the existing uh space community because uh there's so much that goes into actually uh building and deploying a a space station. uh where where I imagine that you're standing on shoulders of giants, but uh walk me through all the things that allow you to accelerate your mission. I

mean the first step is to go from zero to one. It's actually to have a space station and a crew visit it. And if you compare that effort versus the effort of having payload and from partner in science, you know, having it going beyond renders and beyondus and dream and press announcement to have it there, right? Whoever has it there and is profitable will figure out these application.

More concretely, we have partnered with companies like Redwire, a company in Europe called Yuri uh and other companies and we have a laboratory on the first station haven one uh which is which basically are companies that have already done science and are doing now on the ISS. So we brought them in on our space station that we launch next year and then our astronauts will be will be continuing the science and research. uh beyond that you know right now we are in the R&D phase whether it's materials semiconductors uh you know making drugs in space that we can't make on earth thanks to the microgravity environment uh it's still R&D right there's no killer app no product uh and through being commercial doing more flights being commercially friendly uh we confident we will we will unlock it so uh we're super excited with what NASA did right they created thousands and thousands of experiment and they found some interesting application and so we benefit from that that full pipeline uh when our station will be up.

How important is the next generation of reusable rockets, the starships of the world to unlocking new capabilities in deploying space stations?

I mean, if you even go back to reusable rocket uh even before, right, Falcon and what SpaceX has done,

uh we couldn't be here without the the early transition to commercial that NASA and SpaceX have done with the Dragon spacecraft. You know, it's pretty, you know, if if we were still in the space shuttle era, I don't think I could be buying a ride to commercial space station haven one from from NASA. And because of what they did with that program, hopefully they'll get Starlininer up and running, the the Boeing version. You know, we can go call SpaceX and buy a ride for astronaut to to our space station.

Starship will, you know, take that, you know, what we hope is it will lower the cost of transportation to our space station by at least an order of magnitude. uh it'll allow us to bring not four people but maybe 20 people u so that's really a big timing and a big unlock uh you know it still will take a little while for for it to arrive it will get there and our our goal is that by the time starship is ready that we have a large enough space station uh so that you know in relation to the volume inside Starship we are still you know four or five time larger we have a lot more power lot equipment so so we you know it's a key enabler why we are here and and why uh the future future is exciting for space station. The arrival of

uh

sort of a random question, but I'm just curious what what is the planned process for retiring the current space station? You do the humans leave and it just kind of continues to orbit? Do they uh take it out of orbit? What is that? Do you have any idea what that'll look like?

Yeah, it's interesting. When they design a space station, they sort of pun that, right? Like non they don't have the ability to de-orbit itself. And so they always had the plan to build a special, you know, spacecraft that will push it in the Pacific. And that's called a USD orbit vehicle. SpaceX won that contract. I think NASA is hoping to get it there, you know, two or three years before the retirement of the ISS. The current retirement date is the end of 2030. There's discussion now to extend it to 32, but somewhere in that region. So it will be there ready to go, especially if there's a safety issue or something like that and to do testing. And then they will just push it um you know with some delta v some some propulsion uh to eventually it will re-enter in a in a pretty interesting uh uh display if there was anyone there to to a place called Point Nemo in the in the in the Pacific. I think NASA is expecting to de crew it nominally meaning not in an emergency scenario due to the aging. Um maybe a year ahead of that uh but but I don't know the exact date. Well, hopefully they can get a camera there and live stream it because uh I'm sure they're pretty good at at watching the rockets come down even when they're uh landing in the middle of the ocean. So hopefully we can see the de-orbiting.

Yeah, we saw some some of the Starship uh re-entry was pretty spectacular. So hopefully we'll see the same. So

yeah. Yeah, in the Indian Ocean. That was a remarkable video.

What uh dramatic ending?

Is is the entire team based in Los Angeles? Where's kind of where's the team dispersed and what are you hiring for going forward? Yeah, with just over a thousand people in, you know, more than 900 in in the Los Angeles in Long Beach specifically, you know, manufacturing, you know, we have control room, we have integration room. We we manufacture our primary structure. We brought that capability to America for for 20 years. It has been outsourced abroad. You can see actually on on my right our test site in Mojave. Then we have an operation in the Mojave Desert where we test things. Uh you know, we're a pretty small team there. Uh we have an office in DC. We just opened an office in in Japan uh where where you've seen some of our investors are from Japan the largest bank MUFG uh Mitsui from Japan and and Nikon the camera company uh Japan is actually one of the key market for human space flight you know they were really a co-builder of the of the international space station and and they want to continue with the 10 billion fund

that's amazing well congratulations on all the progress thank you so

yeah great to meet so so excited to follow along

and uh congrats on the milestone

thank Thank you. Thank you. And I hear John, you're a watch space watch fan from your interview with

Oh, yes. Yes. Do you have any recommendations if I'm going to space?

We partnered with IWC. Here you go.

There you go. That's a great selection.

Bring bringing new revenue stream to to commercial space and uh in in April we announcing a new watch that we've designed with them. That that's designed for space. So hopefully check that out soon.

Incredible.

That's Yeah, it's amazing. Last year we were partnered with a company called Bezel. We're a marketplace for buying those watches. and I'm sure they'd be flying off the shelf. Uh, so thank you so much for advancing space and advancing the equally important industry of fine watchmaking. We appreciate everything you do. Have a great rest of your day.

Great to meet you, Max.

Thanks, guys.

Talk to you soon.

Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Uh, Oracle has joined the rateayer pro protection pledge. Uh they said, "We are proud to be part of the White House's mission to advance American AI leadership while protecting the communities in which we build data centers. We are committing to pay we are committed to paying our own way on energy, hiring locally, protecting local water resources and enriching communities across the country. AI isn't just about technology. It's about strengthening communities while fueling America's future." Let's go with some GPT.

They had a dog. They had a dog food

maybe. Who knows? But uh but it's I mean it's a good point. Google, Oracle, XAI, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Amazon have now signed on to the rateayer protection pledge. Very smart. That seems like

a really really important move because you have the resources, you have the capital, go build the energy. Do not spike the local uh do not spike the local energy rates because uh the communities will

protest and they will block you. And it's just game theory 101 to just not not not let the negative externalities run wild in the communities of a democracy. Anyway,

Ben Smith and Semaphore Rachel Jones are covering a new AI cost, hardened data centers.

They say building new data centers in underground nuclear hardened bunkers, which some companies began doing recently, costs more than $2,000 per square foot in the US. According to Larry Hall, who owns Kansasbased bunker real estate firm Survival Condo.

Wow.

That's We got to get uh Nick, if you're hearing this, we got to get Larry Hall.

We got to talk.

Kansasbased bunker real estate firm, Survival Condo.

Sounds amazing.

That's twice the cost of constructing a facility from scratch above ground. And building in the Middle East can be more expensive depending on the terrain. M

given the average data center spans the size of a Manhattan city block an underground concrete shelter of that size might go for 200 million and that's before factoring in the cost to cover energy cooling and servers of course GPUs

the cooling seems

still most of survival condos clients are looking for facilities smaller than that the cheapest facility the firm has priced was for an existing 54,000t bunker costing just 45 million

uh this is uh there's some extra context from Matthew Shaw. After Amazon's Bahrain data center was hit, this will likely be heightened. I'm sure people at CISA are looking into this issue. So in the Middle East particularly while uh there are conflicts undergoing uh underway, I'm sure people will be looking at the future of how they build these data centers. Let's

Netflix acquires AI filmm startup founded by Ben Afflac.

No way.

Who will serve as advisor to Netflix.

Very exciting.

Company is called Inner Positive. Mhm.

that makes AI powered tools for filmmakers. The system builds AI models from a film's dailies.

Dailies are the

Oh, yeah. You guys want to explain?

Explain dailies, Ben. That's good. Do you know that, John?

Come on, film. Yes, I know what dailies are.

Dailies are when you were shooting on film, you would send the daily print to the lab and they would look at it and they could review it to make sure if they needed to reshoot the next day.

Yeah. So, it's basically like reviewing the film that you shot in one day at the end of the day or before you go shoot because you might not have torn down the set. You might still be at the same location. You don't want to leave and wrap that particular shoot until you have reviewed the footage. Um, but dailies, it just means that uh post-production C tasks like color, relighting, VFX. So, you're on set, you go and you shoot that one cinematic scene, the dramatic scene, and typically when you're watching it, there's no monster in the background. There's no color grade. It's very flat. It doesn't look like the final movie. If you can use AI and AI powered tools to get you much closer to something that looks like what the final movie will look like, then very quickly you can turn around that daily shoot into, okay, it's, you know, we got a bunch of raw footage. Let's edit it together so that if we're filming me and then we're filming you, we cut it back and forth, cut it back together, color grade it, do some basic sound design. Even if it's sloppy AI slop, it's like going to be much more watchable than just watching like the Rock.

What do you What do you think Netflix like plans to do with this tech? Is this something they'll offer to productions that they're funding? Is that the idea? Yeah, I I would imagine that uh I'm not I'm not exactly sure how much more they're going to be scaling up their their you know in-house production budget, but I could imagine that that this gets deployed into uh projects that are being filmed and run and produced by Netflix directly. But uh we'll have to see. We'd love to have someone on for Netflix. Without further ado, let me