Billionaire Jed Mccaleb's Space Station Company Vast Acquires Startup Launcher

Vast, a space station company, announced on Tuesday that it had acquired Launcher, a rival startup, as part of its acquisition of the former, which effectively triples the latter's headcount and expands its technology portfolio.

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“It is a complicated undertaking to build a space station, and it takes a lot of people to accomplish it," Vast founder and CEO Jed McCaleb told Trade Algo. “Launcher has engineers that will be able to accelerate the process just by getting them on board.”

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The Vast project aims to build artificial gravity habitats for humans, a step beyond the zero gravity environment that already exists on the International Space Station or on other private stations in the making. A new number of about 80 employees will be added to Vast's existing staff of 40, as well as the company's Orbiter satellite "space tug" and the E-2 liquid rocket engine, which is currently being developed by the company.

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“They built a lot of technology that is directly applicable to what we're doing, so we don't have to re-develop it,” McCaleb said.

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It was not disclosed what the financial terms of the deal were.

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“Both our investors and our team are extremely pleased with this deal; it is a win-win situation for both parties,” said Launcher founder Max Haot, who will be joining Vast as its president in the near future.

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Vast, which has its headquarters in Long Beach, California, with a 115,000-square-foot facility, was established last year by McCaleb, a cryptocurrency millionaire who made his fortune in the cryptocurrency market. According to Forbes, he has a net worth of approximately $2.5 billion. Astera Institute, the non-profit McCaleb founded before he started Vast, was McCaleb's first entry into the space industry in 2021. He was appointed to the board of Firefly Aerospace after investing in a non-profit he founded called the Astera Institute.

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It was only last summer that McCaleb and Haot met, and Haot talked to McCaleb about the potential of investing in Launcher, he told Trade Algo. Despite the fact that Haot has built Launcher since 2017 with less than $30 million of funding, he said fundraising was "one of our biggest challenges" and the conversation between Haot and McCaleb quickly became centered around mergers and acquisitions.

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“Thanks to Jed, we now have much greater resources,” Haot said.

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The deal was signed by Vast and Launcher on Nov. 10, and it closed about a week ago.

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“There was no influence from the recent failure of Launcher's first Orbiter mission, which met some of its objectives but was incapable of successfully deploying the multiple customer satellites onboard, in the acquisition process,” Haot stated.

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Orbiter's next two missions are expected to be launched this year.

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“Our goal is to build a station larger than Orbiter, but a lot of the same components and technology will be used on the station, so you kind of need this test platform,” McCaleb explained.

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Launcher was developing a small rocket called Light for which the E-2 engine was being tested at the time when Vast announced that Launcher would no longer be working on the rocket. Although McCaleb acknowledged the E-2 engine is not something that his company could have developed on its own, he said Launcher had made "a lot of progress on that and it seems to be a very valuable product, so we did not want to shut it down."

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McCaleb is the sole funder of Vast presently, as he pursues a long-term goal of building space stations with artificial gravity, which he hopes to achieve in the future.

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“The advantage of having this be self-funded is that we are not beholden to anything except the whims of investors in general; we don't have to worry about the economic cycles,” McCaleb said.

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