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“I actually don’t know which mem-
ber of the team suggested it,” says
Brent Sherwood, Blue Origin’s direc-
tor of advanced development pro-
grams. “But I have promoted a philos-
ophy in my team about partnering that
I call building a coral reef, meaning
that aerospace ultimately needs to be
an ecosystem with a lot of species that
interact in different ways.”
Wherever the name came from,
the hardware the team envisions is
impressive. Orbital Reef, which the
company hopes to launch in the sec-
ond half of this decade, would consist
of just three modules compared with
the ISS’s 17. However, each module
would be bigger than those on the cur-
rent station—so much so that com-
bined, they would provide 91% of the
ISS’s habitable space. As the market
develops—if the market develops—the
company could add more modules to
accommodate more customers.
How Blue Origin would launch
its modules remains an open ques-
tion. The company’s New Shepard
rocket has been launched on 20 sub-
orbital missions, four of them crewed.
But New Shepard is not designed to
lift heavy cargo to orbit. For that, the
company will have to rely on its still-
in- development New Glenn rocket.
Blue Origin has been secretive about
its progress on New Glenn; Sherwood
says only that there will be “more date
specificity” later this year.
Impressive as the plans for Orbital
Reef sound, the folks at Northrop
Grumman believe they have an edge
on Blue Origin—and the fact is, they
do. As part of NASA’s Artemis pro-
gram to return astronauts to the moon
in this decade, the agency is planning
to build what it calls Gateway, a mini–
space station orbiting the moon that
would serve as a way station for astro-
nauts descending to or returning from
the lunar surface. Northrop Grum-
man has been selected to build the
core module of the Gateway, known
as Halo, and construction is already
under way.
“Hardware is already being cut.
The structure is being fabricated at
this point,” says Rick Mastracchio,
Northrop’s director of
business development.
That matters for the com-
pany’s Earth-orbit space-
station plans, because the
core module of that struc-
ture would essentially be
a stretched version of the
Halo module.
Nanoracks is not nearly
so far along, but what it
lacks in actual hardware, it
makes up for in simplicity. The com-
pany has dubbed its station Starlab
and its central laboratory module the
George Washington Carver Science
Park, and envisions the entire struc-
ture as less than half the size of Orbital
Reef. The advantage is that it’s faster
out of the gate, because Nanoracks
wants its station to be habitable after
just a single launch of a single module.
“We’re not trying to build a Taj
Mahal in space,” says Nanoracks board
chairman Jeffrey Manber, who’s aim-
ing for a late 2027 launch. “We want
something that’s sustainable, that’s
frugal, yet exciting.”
For all this industrial churn, the
question remains: Is there a real mar-
ket for private space stations? NASA
is certainly one customer, planningto pay for the privilege of sending its
own astronauts to work aboard some
of the new outposts. But with a poten-
tial four stations flying at once, there
could be more supply than the agen-
cy’s work demands.
There are, too, plenty of deep-
pocketed adventurers who will keep at
least a marginal space- tourism indus-
try viable, and all of the companies are
open to flying astronauts from other,
friendly countries’ space programs, as
well as crew members from private in-
dustry conducting potential for-profit
research in orbit.
“It’s like a traditional business
park,” says Sherwood. “We do the
utilities—the sewers, power lines, all
the stuff that makes it usable. The ten-
ants have their own business model—
maybe a filmmaker or a national labo-
ratory. But my attitude is if you pay
your rent and you don’t break my
space station, then I’m happy.”
Still, Sherwood himself agrees that
his business park might not be joined
by a lot of other business
parks. “The good news is
[that the market] exists,
it’s proven, it’s stable, it’s
predictable. The bad news
is it’s stable, it’s predict-
able. It’s not necessarily a
large growth market. And
so if you start subdividing it
across multiple providers,
you weaken the business
case for all of them.”
Instead, as with the personal-
computer business in the 1980s, there
is likely to be a sort of Darwinian
winnowing, with the strongest com-
pany or two surviving and the others
squeezed out by having too few cus-
tomers or too little revenue to survive
in a competitive climate. Indeed, some
of the stations may wind up as nothing
more than vaporware, finding them-
selves shelved before they’re built
if the market doesn’t develop or the
manufacturing price climbs too high.
Either way, one thing is certain: close
to a quarter-century after the first
component of the ISS went online, the
U.S. government is retiring its space-
station portfolio. The laws of commer-
cial natural selection will determine
who picks up that work. ‘I believe
it’s a
$1 trillion
industry.’
—MATT ONDLER,
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY
OFFICER, AXIOM SPACE