Jed McCaleb made a fortune in cryptocurrency. Now he’s prepared to lose a big chunk of it in space. The billionaire behind the infamous Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange and the cryptocurrency XRP is the sole financial backer of a wildly ambitious effort to build the world’s first commercial space station and send it into orbit. If he succeeds, his startup, Vast Space LLC, will be well-positioned to win a lucrative contract from NASA next year—potentially worth billions of dollars—to replace the International Space Station. If it’s a bust, McCaleb says, he’s fully prepared to lose $1 billion of his fortune. McCaleb controls billions partly via two foundations, which reported a total of $3.3 billion in assets at the end of 2023, funded by his own donations. He’s since hired an industry veteran as chief executive officer, and SpaceX is lending Vast some of its technology while Elon Musk urges the US to speed up the timeline for decommissioning the ISS, currently expected to be retired by the end of 2030. Vast, founded in 2021, is assembling its craft partly with components that SpaceX developed, notably a docking adapter to connect SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to Vast’s station and an in-space internet system that will provide Wi-Fi on the station via Starlink. Vast has already booked SpaceX flights to send its hardware into orbit and deliver crew to its station, and SpaceX has agreed to carry astronauts for Vast, as long as NASA gives its go-ahead. But the task is nonetheless daunting, and there’s little in McCaleb’s biography that makes clear he’s the person to take it on. The Arkansas farm boy and University of California at Berkeley dropout has no background in the industry. His career has been marked by a pattern of getting in on the ground floor of emerging technologies and then pivoting before government regulation and other headwinds upend the businesses—not exactly the kind of long-term focus that seems a prerequisite for winning a high-stakes competition to create a technological marvel. Prior to the acquisition, Haot hadn’t been focused on space stations. Instead he was trying to follow in Musk’s footsteps by creating another rocket launch startup, Launcher. With $30 million of investment, the company had made headway on developing a rocket engine and launch vehicle, but the two satellites Launcher built suffered failures after reaching space. Haot met McCaleb in 2022 as he was looking for an investor. McCaleb offered a takeover instead, with the understanding that Haot would come on as Vast’s president and, eventually, CEO. It was a deal Haot was reluctant to take at first, but he came around to the idea when it became apparent Launcher would struggle to get the capital it needed. Terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed. Vast’s grand vision goes beyond building the first private space station. The company also wants to develop a system for creating artificial gravity that would replicate Earth’s conditions for future astronauts. The engineering is complex: It would involve taking advantage of centrifugal force with massive rotating modules in space. It’s an enticing proposition, because years of humans living and working on the ISS have shown that long-term stays in microgravity can damage various biological systems. All that is far off, though. Right now, Vast needs to get its first station in orbit. It’s quickly built up its staff to 740—ranging from technical engineers to a spacesuit fabricator—from fewer than 200 less than a year ago. Vast’s headquarters operates around the clock, with engineers and construction crews working on alternating shifts to either expand its Long Beach facility or build Vast’s first prototype space station, named Haven-1. Space stations are a staple of pop culture—think of the Death Star from Star Wars and the titular space station in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine—but they’ve also been a critical component of US space exploration since 1973, when astronauts first boarded the experimental Skylab station. Decades later, as the Cold War thawed, NASA teamed up with Russia and other nations to build the larger ISS. Since November 2000 there’s always been at least one human crew member on board, often researching how materials and the human body behave in the microgravity environment. Haven-1, roughly 33 feet tall and 14.5 feet wide, is meant to fit snugly inside the nose cone of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The station will have a habitable space of almost 1,600 cubic feet (45 cubic meters), or about double that of an average RV. It will be equipped with personal sleeping quarters, a large window, wood paneling and a communal table for a four-person crew. At least that’s the goal. In January the company began construction on Haven-1, with a proposed launch date of May 2026, which was pushed back from an original goal of as early as August this year. The company recently tested a prototype to confirm that the structure could withstand the internal atmospheric pressure, and it’s working on power systems, propulsion and other critical components for crewed missions. Its outer shell must be able to endure the harsh environment and temperatures of space while also containing the pressures and atmospheric gases people are accustomed to on Earth. “Right now we are not a space station company,” says Haot. “We are an aspiring space station company.” Once Haven-1 is launched, assuming things go according to plan, Vast will then send to space a crew of four astronauts in a Falcon 9 rocket to dock with the station. If the first launch proves successful, Vast’s plan is to then send the first module of its next station, Haven-2, by 2028. It will form the beginning piece for a much larger base that’s designed to serve as a replacement for NASA’s ISS. Among the biggest challenges will be crafting a functioning life-support system. The ISS employs a regenerative setup that recycles all wastewater into potable water and carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen. Such a system is needed if passengers are going to stay long term on any orbiting platform, but Haven-1 won’t have one because crews are expected to stay only for short visits. Vast plans to eventually have one for Haven-2, though it doesn’t expect the station to be permanently crewed for the first few years. Those competitors, despite their space pedigree and some launch contracts, also don’t have such a close partnership with SpaceX. McCaleb is keen to downplay any personal relationship, saying he’s met Musk “a couple of times—he probably won’t remember me,” despite both men having also invested in OpenAI. Although they differ in approach and demeanor, their respective interests and unconventional rise to riches share multiple parallels: Both dropped out of school (Musk at a later stage) to start software businesses in emerging fields (Musk, online directories; McCaleb, video streaming), and both parlayed a love of fantasy and games into financial success. McCaleb’s first venture, eDonkey, was one of the earliest file-sharing services on the internet—an early competitor to Napster. Founded in 2000, it allowed users to share music and films for free, while generating the company millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. The business was shut down in 2006 after agreeing to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $30 million to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits. McCaleb’s next success was Mt. Gox, one of the world’s earliest Bitcoin trading platforms. The site, which McCaleb founded in 2010, grew rapidly before the entrepreneur sold a majority stake a year later for an undisclosed sum. In February 2014, the exchange collapsed into bankruptcy, with users losing coins then valued at more than $400 million, the biggest crypto failure in history until FTX in 2023. Despite still being a minority owner, McCaleb faced no sanctions and said he too had lost money in the collapse. By then, McCaleb had already started his next idea: XRP, the cryptocurrency trading on the Ripple protocol, which he also co-controlled. McCaleb owned 9% of the coins at the outset. Following disagreements with his co-founders, McCaleb left the company in 2013 but kept his currency, which he sold down over the following years. The value of XRP surged during the crypto mania of late 2017, eventually swelling the market cap to $130 billion in January 2018. McCaleb netted about $3.2 billion from selling XRP and Ripple equity from 2014 to 2022, according to an analysis of transactions from XRPScan. “He’s one of the top 10 most important crypto founders, even though nobody really knows him,” says Nic Carter, founding partner of Castle Island Ventures, an investment company focused on public blockchains. “It’s interesting. The other ones are these pretty flamboyant, loud, extravagant people.” McCaleb, for all his success, keeps his circle close, working with Yagan and other long-standing collaborators. He has a house in surfing haven Costa Rica and a home in Berkeley, and he has his own plane. In the space industry, McCaleb provides a steady source of investment in an often volatile sector, where once-high-flying startups routinely collapse in failure while starved for capital. And despite a lawsuit from a former employee alleging that Vast tried to cut corners, the company doesn’t seem to come with some of the baggage of SpaceX; its billionaire CEO is largely home with his wife and three children instead of trying to reshape the federal government. Should McCaleb’s venture prove a success, Vast has booked multiple crewed missions with SpaceX to launch private astronauts into orbit, and both McCaleb and Haot say they’re willing to board flights themselves. (As a kid, I spent a lot of time outside exploring, looking up at the sky to see how amazing it is, McCaleb says.) But the whole thing hinges first on the company’s ability to win the final contracts for the NASA program intended to jump-start the commercial space stations that could replace the ISS. The program comes with a soft guarantee that NASA will buy time and space on any stations that make it into orbit, serving as a steady source of revenue. Contracts are expected to be handed out in mid-2026. Without the NASA contract, the commercial viability of any space station is doubtful, Haot says. “It’s a matter of existence for us to win that competition.”

Jed McCaleb's Space Ambitions: Building the First Private Space Station

Jed McCaleb, the billionaire behind Mt. Gox and XRP, is backing Vast Space LLC to build the world's first commercial space station. The company, founded in 2021, is collaborating with SpaceX and NASA to develop Haven-1, a prototype space station expected to launch in May 2026. Vast aims to replace the International Space Station (ISS) with a larger base by 2028. The company has raised significant funding and hired an industry veteran as CEO. McCaleb's investments and partnerships with SpaceX and NASA are crucial for Vast's success.