Human spaceflight is on the cusp of an intriguing new dawn. For 25 years, astronauts have lived and worked aboard the International Space Station (ISS), since the arrival of its first passengers on November 2, 2000. Built as a post-Cold War partnership between the United States and Russia, the ISS has seen five presidential administrations, the rise and fall of iPods, and even the launch of another orbital habitat, China's Tiangong Space Station. But the ISS's days are numbered. By 2031, NASA plans to remove the space station from orbit. Citation aging equipment and rising costs, the agency will return it through Earth's atmosphere within fire jump to the Pacific Ocean.
If everything goes according to plan, commercial space stations— outposts run not by government agencies but by private companies — will take the place of the ISS to consolidate its success. The first of these will launch next year, with many others to follow soon. They all share the same goal – to promote a vibrant, human-centric economy in Earth orbit – and ultimately beyond.
“We hope to build a habitat on the moon [and] Mars and eventually even a space station with artificial gravity,” says Max Haot, CEO of Vast, a Long Beach, Calif., company that is at the forefront of the private space exploration sector. Space station Haven 1 already in May 2026. Following Haven-1 will be several more habitats from Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Starlab Space. All of them are due to be in 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, says Bill Nelson, who previously served as a U.S. senator and space shuttle crew member, as well as NASA administrator from 2021 to 2025, and formalized the timeline for the nation's transition to commercial space stations. “The station has done incredible things,” he says, from establishing how to live safely in space to exploring the promise and dangers of microgravity. All this time, the ISS has been a shining beacon of global cooperation.
Nelson said NASA's shift from being an operator of the ISS to a lessee 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 was government. Now we have commercial partners and international partners.”
Some argue that the ISS could still have a long life if it were put into a higher orbit, where it could remain intact for decades or centuries. “I think this is the most amazing thing that humanity has ever created,” says Greg Autry, a space policy expert at the University of Central Florida. “It's like Buckingham Palace coming down from orbit. It's an amazing historic building and should be celebrated for that.” NASA, however, decided that saving the ISS would be too expensive and complicated. Instead, the space agency chose pay SpaceX almost 1 billion dollars To develop a car this would return the station back to Earth's atmosphere in 2031, leaving China's Tiangong space station as the only government outpost in orbit.
By the time this happens, several commercial space stations may be active. Haven-1, the first of these, is a unique RV-sized structure that will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The station initially launched uncrewed but will offer stays of up to 10 days for both government and private visitors, all of whom plan to travel to Haven 1 via the SpaceX Dragon capsule. The price for private bookings has not been disclosed at this time.
“Our core business model is 85 percent government space agencies, including NASA, and then maybe 15 percent private citizens,” Haot says. On board, four passengers will have private sleeping quarters with air beds, a dome-shaped window for observing the Earth and high-speed Internet provided by SpaceX's Starlink service. A built-in science laboratory will allow them to conduct research on the station.
Haven-1 is the precursor to a much larger design planned by Vast, called Haven-2, which is expected to be launched by the time the ISS closes. Haven-2 will consist of several modules similar to Haven-1, arranged in a cross shape to ensure a permanent human presence in orbit, rather than a short stay like Haven-1. They will join him other commercial enterprises— Axiom Station, Blue Origin Orbital Reef and Stellar Laboratory.
New priorities may emerge with any new private era in Earth orbit. While the ISS was theoretically a science-focused station, private habitats would inevitably have a broader scope of activity, from the proverbial space hotels to manufacturing centers for products imported back to Earth. “You can make much better silicon crystals. [for semiconductors] in space,” Autry says, listing one of several perennial arguments for increasing industrial activity in orbit.[There are] a lot of different economic factors that I think will pay off in the end,” and the space tourism business “will be a lot bigger than most people think.”
Autry points to Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, which launches paying customers straight up and down on suborbital flights that last just 10 minutes but have already carried about 80 people (including some regular customers). “There's really a lot of demand,” he says, arguing that the increase in the number of space flights – and the number of destinations – 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 of science on commercial space stations will depend to some extent on the instruments that customers can use on board. The major players have already suggested that a range of appropriate, high-quality laboratory equipment will become the norm. Fabrizio Fiore, an astrophysicist at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste in Italy, says this means more opportunities for scientists to conduct research that was logistically impossible on the ISS. “Even wearing a small thing [the ISS] “It's very, very time-consuming and difficult,” he says. “If we have space stations that are not intended for government astronauts, it will be much easier to build experiments on them.”
Research institutes and universities could also expand their access to space, perhaps by sending their own astronauts. Earlier this year, for example, Purdue University booked tickets to fly in 2027 on Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceplane for a pair of its researchers. It's entirely possible that the same could happen with commercial space stations, especially if the cost of visiting them can be brought down to a reasonable level.
More broadly, some see the advent of private space stations as a turning point in life itself. Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist from the United States, argues in his new book Giant Leap that space exploration is the next step in human evolution. “The ability to put objects into orbit around Earth and study Earth from space is a unique perspective that no other organism has had in the history of life on Earth over the last four billion years,” he says. “Getting into space is another major point of evolutionary transition. You can imagine that if we do spread throughout the solar system in the coming centuries, it will cause fundamental changes in us as a species. It will dilute us. It will disperse us. We will undergo speciation. Although we now call ourselves 'humans' as a single species, in the future there may be many species that have evolved from what we are today.”
Commercial space stations, Scharf says, could be the next step in that journey, but he's not quite ready to buy the ticket or the hype. “Maybe we'll find out that commercial space stations are the best thing that ever existed,” he says. “Or perhaps we will find that this is not actually the be all and end all. It is absolutely possible that commercial space stations, for economic or financial reasons, will not deliver what is expected or hoped for.”
Humans are also planning to return to the moon by the end of the decade in competing efforts, one led by the United States and the other by China. Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birkbeck, University of London, previously stated that space stations could be a distraction from these efforts. “To properly talk about space exploration, we need to move away from low-Earth orbit,” he says. “I don’t know how space hotels in low-Earth orbit affect this.”
Whatever direction these new stations take, they will mark the end of a historic experiment—a full quarter-century (and counting) of people living and working off-planet. This feat is all the more remarkable for how unremarkable it seems now: More than 40 percent of all people on Earth are younger than the ISS and have never known a world without it. For many of them, the quiet technical triumph of continuous occupation of a station in orbit is understandably banal, boring and routine. That is, like many wonderful things we take for granted, it seems that the ISS will not be understood for good until it disappears.
