Vast announces line of high-power satellite buses

WASHINGTON — Commercial space station developer Vast is moving into satellite manufacturing with a line of high-power satellite buses.

The company announced May 19 Vast Satellite, a product line that uses the technologies Vast developed for commercial space stations to make satellite buses designed for applications ranging from broadband communications to orbital data centers.

The first product is a bus that provides 15 kilowatts of power. The flat-panel bus, with primary dimensions of 2.2 by 3.6 meters, has a dry mass of 700 kilograms and can host payloads of at least 350 kilograms. Designed for initial use in low Earth orbit, the bus has an electric propulsion system that provides more than 500 meters per second of delta-v, or change in velocity.

Vast will also offer an option to include a Vera Rubin Space-1 module from Nvidia. That module will provide advanced computing capabilities for orbital data centers and artificial intelligence applications.

Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, said in an interview that the bus was a natural extension of the company’s work on commercial space stations. “If you started looking at every single successful space company with heritage, they were all diversified in programs, from SpaceX to Rocket Lab,” he said. “The only questions are when do you do it and what do you do.”

The company was already producing all the major technologies needed for the satellite bus through its work on Haven-1, a single-module space station set to launch next year. Many of those systems were successfully tested in space on Haven Demo, a satellite Vast launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission in November 2025 on a four-month test flight. The only major exceptions are the deployable solar arrays and electric thrusters.

“It’s the perfect overlap,” he said. “Other than the chassis, we expect close to 100% overlap with the Haven space station.”

The company also sees strong demand for the satellite bus. “We are going towards a world where low-cost but high-power satellites are really the future,” he said, citing interest in communications, radar imaging, national security applications and orbital data centers. “All of them, if they can afford it, can always use more power and larger spacecraft.”

Vast announced it has one confidential customer for the bus, with an order for four spacecraft and an option for 200 more. Vast is planning to launch an initial set of 10 satellites in late 2027.

Vast is entering a market with competition from both established and emerging companies. “We’re really in the early days for that product category” of high-power satellite buses, Haot said, arguing that Vast had an advantage in the technologies and production capabilities it has already developed for commercial space stations.

“We have the proven spacecraft bus and we have the infrastructure we need to manufacture and test these large-scale satellites in volume,” he said. “We are uniquely positioned to build large spacecraft, leveraging that investment, and in our view better positioned than small satellite companies to move into this area.”

Vast has a team of about 10 employees dedicated to satellite production now, taking advantage of the company’s infrastructure and facilities, that will grow to about 50 people next year. “I think you could expect that, assuming the traction is what we believe it will be in terms of signed customers, we will have dedicated facilities for it by mid-next year,” he said.

That effort will be led by Jim Martz, the senior vice president of special projects at the company who managed the Haven Demo mission. He previously worked on satellite programs at Muon Space and the Starshield military satellite effort at SpaceX.

Haot said the company is considering larger spacecraft that can take advantage of the capacity of SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. “We definitely will be offering a product for that scale of power and size,” he said. “It’s not yet in development, but scaling up is actually pretty easy from the scale that we are talking about here.”