The International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2030, and the central question everybody’s asking is: what’s next? The answer, at least outside of China, is commercially owned and operated space stations: ones that do much of what the ISS does, but with different approaches and structures.
Though NASA’s “Ignition” event in March did suggest it may be rethinking that approach, the agency ultimately announced in May that it would be sticking with its Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Destinations program, and released a draft request for proposals (RFP) in July asking American companies how best to “ensure a seamless transition of activities” from the ISS to these new stations.
There is one caveat to that date. A NASA authorization bill approved by the Senate Commerce Committee in March would extend the station to Sept. 30, 2032, to avoid a gap in continuous human presence in orbit before commercial stations are ready. The bill is a long way from law: the full Senate has still to vote, the House will have its own say, and the two chambers would need to reconcile any differences between their versions before anything reaches the president.
One of the primary purposes of the ISS is scientific research, and Canadians may wonder how the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Canadian companies will carry that “seamless transition” of research across to the new stations.
The CSA has already said it is working on the answer. Its 2026–27 Departmental Plan, tabled this year, notes that “successor space stations are emerging under NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Destinations program and other international partners’ plans for LEO,” and commits the agency to “study options to ensure the continuity of Canada’s astronaut, research, and technology activities in low Earth orbit after the ISS is decommissioned” during 2026–27. The same document records federal support for Canada’s ISS participation only through 2030.
After 2030, for Canada, what’s next?
It depends…
The four LEO options
There is technically a fifth option before the four: striking some arrangement with China to use its Tiangong space station. China was never a partner in the ISS, and its own station program predates the American restrictions that arrived when the 2011 “Wolf Amendment,” which bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with China, became law. The core module of Tiangong launched in April 2021. Tiangong has hosted experiments from a range of countries, and Canada is looking to build new international relationships. But Canadian research aboard a Chinese station would be politically charged and invite American disapproval, and remains unlikely.
Beyond Tiangong, there are four post-ISS contenders in NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program: Vast’s Haven-2, Axiom Station, Starlab from Voyager Technologies, and Orbital Reef from Blue Origin and Sierra Space. How would each work out for Canadian science? And how likely is each to be tapped for the job?
Vast’s first mover
Vast Space is working hard to be first out of the gate with Haven-1, a small single-module station built to host four astronauts for missions of about two weeks. It carries its own life support and its own thrusters, and draws power from twelve deployable solar arrays producing 13.2 kilowatts at peak. It launches uncrewed on a Falcon 9 as a 15-tonne spacecraft. A SpaceX Crew Dragon brings the crew up afterwards and supplements the station’s carbon dioxide scrubbing while docked. Vast is aiming to make Haven-1 the world’s first commercial space station, and is targeting the first quarter of 2027. It is building the station in-house, and production appears to be on schedule following the switch to 2027.
Haven-1 will host scientific experiments. Interstellar Lab is flying Eden 1.0, which Vast describes as a fully automated controlled-environment greenhouse with autonomous climate, light and fertigation control; the Japanese firm JAMSS and the Luxembourg biotech Exobiosphere signed on at the same time. Vast’s build-the-simplest-thing-first approach makes it more likely there will actually be a Haven-1 to work aboard. But the same approach means it may be some time before the CSA judges it safe to use, and its capacity for experiments will stay limited.
One thing sets Vast apart from the rest of the field: NASA has not paid for any of it. The agency’s funded Commercial LEO Destinations awards in December 2021 came to about $US 415 million, split between Blue Origin, Nanoracks (now Voyager) and Northrop Grumman, with Axiom holding a separate contract of roughly $US 140 million for its ISS module. Vast’s NASA agreement, signed in 2023, is an unfunded one: the agency contributes technical expertise, assessments and data, and no money. Chief executive Max Haot has put the company’s own outlay at a billion dollars. It is also the only contender with a flight primary structure built and acceptance-tested.
Its larger multi-module successor, Haven-2, will have more scientific capacity. Vast announced it in October 2024 as its proposed replacement for the ISS, and it is the design the company is taking into the NASA competition. It will likely reach orbit after its competitors, and there are few public details about it beyond the modular layout and Vast’s statement that its first module is essentially an iteration of Haven-1.
Axiom Station as an ISS successor?
Axiom, meanwhile, is a more widely known company building a larger station, called Axiom Station. It already runs private missions to the ISS aboard SpaceX Crew Dragons, and has flown customers from nine countries, including Canada. Montreal investor Mark Pathy flew on Axiom’s first mission in April 2022, running experiments for Canadian researchers.
This connection to the ISS is what distinguishes Axiom from the others. Though the plans have changed over time, Axiom still starts by launching a module that will dock to the ISS no earlier than 2028. That module, the Payload Power Thermal Module (PPTM), will provide power and thermal capacity to Axiom Station.
While it is attached, it will also take on transfers of research equipment and experiments from the ISS before the station’s deorbiting.
Thales Alenia Space is building the pressurized structures for Axiom’s modules. In February 2026 Axiom raised $US 350 million, co-led by Type One Ventures and the Qatar Investment Authority, to finish the PPTM and continue work on the habitation module, at a valuation of $US 2 billion, down from $US 2.6 billion in 2023.
Slightly less than a year later, in 2029, the crew module Hab-1 is expected to launch and the PPTM to detach from the ISS to meet it. The two are expected to dock and become the free-flying Axiom Station, with an airlock module, a second habitation module and a research and manufacturing module to follow by the early 2030s. NASA also handed Axiom the shuttle-era Raffaello logistics module in 2023, to be refitted and flown as part of the station, though nothing has been said publicly about it since.
Of the four, Axiom is the only one that will attach to the ISS, and the only one in a position to carry equipment across before the station comes down. It won’t reach its full scientific capability until the early 2030s, and that assumes no further delays on the later modules.
From the Canadian perspective it may well be a good choice, because the Canadian connection is already there. MDA Space is supplying Canadarm3-derived technology to Axiom Station: 62 payload interface pairs, the mechanical, electrical and data fixture points that externally mounted experiments plug into, and the foundation for any robotic arm the station adds later. Spacewalks will not be possible until the airlock module arrives, so those external interfaces are how Axiom handles outside payloads in the meantime.
Axiom also signed a deal with Kepler Communications in 2025 for on-orbit computing capacity on an optical data relay constellation, part of Axiom’s push into orbital data centre infrastructure.
The CSA has not named Axiom, or any other station, as a destination for Canadian astronauts or Canadian experiments. MDA hardware is under contract for it, and a Canadian has already flown one of its missions.
Starlab’s research pull
Then there is Starlab, which its owners call a U.S.-led global joint venture. Voyager Technologies, Airbus, Mitsubishi Corporation, Canada’s MDA Space, Palantir and Belgium’s Space Applications Services all hold equity in it. Northrop Grumman, Hilton and Ohio State University are attached as strategic partners rather than owners. Unlike Axiom it is one large spacecraft, launched in one go: 17 metres tall and 7.7 metres across, six floors of which three are full decks, about 400 cubic metres of pressurized volume, 65 tonnes dry, with room for four permanent crew and eight during handovers.
Starlab carries an MDA robotic arm from the company’s SKYMAKER line, the commercial cousin of Canadarm. The station has one airlock, a science airlock with a sliding table for passing payloads in and out, and no way for crew to go outside. “No spacewalks,” Taylor said when asked about it during a recent walkthrough inside a Starlab mockup. External maintenance runs through the arm.
But what it is built for is scientific research, which is fitting. Voyager acquired Nanoracks, which built the Bishop airlock, the only commercially owned hardware on the ISS, and has run more than 1,400 missions to the station, making it the largest commercial user of the ISS today. “We knew what the research and use cases were, and so we could optimize our design for what we knew the market was in need of,” Taylor says. The walkthrough shows a full deck given over to research and microgravity manufacturing, racked out in the mid-deck locker equivalents that ISS experiments are measured in, the units that gave Nanoracks its name.
The missions are longer than Haven-1’s, and if it launches no earlier than 2029, the date Voyager gave after clearing its NASA critical design review, it will be running well before Axiom’s research module arrives. Starlab is about a third of the ISS by volume but claims all of its research capacity. “The International Space Station is the best thing humans have done,” Taylor says, but “it was never optimized purely for research.” His example is an astronaut on a treadmill beside a thin-film experiment.
Starlab has more than sold out its research capacity. Taylor puts it at “about 130% pre-sold.” Customers already signed include United Semiconductors, growing semiconductor crystals in microgravity, and LambdaVision, which he says has grown human eye tissue in orbit. Canadian experiments would likely find a place, though possibly behind a queue, and MDA, which Taylor lists among the equity holders as “MDA for Canada,” is a strategic partner and equity owner well placed to help open a door.
Starlab is also too big for the Falcon 9, the only rocket flying today that could take it up if it were ready to go. Axiom’s modules and Haven-1 are sized for that rocket, which is why Axiom is assembled from interlocking pieces like the ISS and why Haven-1 is a single module. Starlab is not built to those limits. It goes up whole, on one flight of SpaceX’s Starship, under a contract signed in January 2024. Taylor says the single launch is the point of the design: the company can build, test and commission the station on the ground, then be operational a day after it reaches orbit. He says Starlab could also fly on New Glenn “with some tweaks,” which would mean optimizing the volume, and a smaller station. Like any launch date years out, 2029 could move.
Blue Origin and its Orbital Reef
Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef is a larger station built around Sierra Space’s inflatable LIFE habitat, with roughly twice Starlab’s pressurized volume and room for ten. Blue Origin says it “continues to achieve milestones” under its NASA agreement, and NASA reported in April 2025 that the company had finished a round of human-in-the-loop testing, with participants simulating cargo transfer, stowage and worksite assessments in microgravity. It is the furthest of the four from flight hardware, though, and has no Canadian supplier or partner on its team.
What’s next?
So what is the best choice for Canadian research in orbit after the ISS? It depends.
On raw capability Starlab is the obvious pick, and MDA’s stake ties the Canadian space community directly to it. But it launches no earlier than 2029, on a rocket still working up to it, and its research capacity is already more than spoken for.
Axiom offers the equipment transfer, and modules sized for rockets that already fly. It has the Canadian connection through MDA’s interfaces, and a Canadian who has flown one of its missions. But its first module now slips to 2028 and the free-flying station to 2029, with the research module not arriving until the early 2030s, against an ISS that could come down in 2030.
Vast looks like the least likely choice initially, at least for Haven-1: it is small, the missions are two weeks, and a crew only stays while a Crew Dragon is docked. But Vast is furthest along in hardware, is the only contender NASA has not funded, and is bidding Haven-2 rather than Haven-1, so writing it off would be premature.
It could still host many of the CSA experiments concerned with how astronauts’ bodies respond to weightlessness. HomeBase, for example, in which astronauts wear a virtual reality helmet and navigate a simulated tunnel to test how microgravity affects their sense of location, needs little more than the headset. Its principal investigator, Robert Allison of York University, is running data analysis out to 2031, past the ISS’s own end.
NASA says it intends to select at least two contractors for early development before a final competition. The CSA has committed to studying its options this fiscal year. Canada’s place on the ISS rests on a 1998 treaty under which it earns crew time and research allocation by supplying Canadarm2 and Dextre. Commercial stations have no equivalent arrangement. Whether Canada buys access or signs something new has not been decided.