Vast has purchased Launcher.
I’d like to know where the money behind Vast is coming from.
11 thoughts on “Interesting Acquisition”
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Vast has purchased Launcher.
I’d like to know where the money behind Vast is coming from.
Comments are closed.
One of their advisors is the VP of propulsion at SpaceX, another used to work at SpaceX. The third has a common name (Yang Li), whose profile doesn’t show up on LinkedIn. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon Musk is involved in funding Vast.
If they are more than just concepts, they may be well positioned to take advantage of Starship LEO capability when it has proven itself.
That does seem to be the plan. Which also calls into serious question the oft-expressed opinion I see that it will be “years” before anyone but SpaceX designs payloads for Starship.
There will never be a commercial liquid fuel orbital rocket. Musk will go broke funding Falcon 1 and give us all a good laugh. Three tries have failed, now he has to quit, ha-ha! A fourth try? No fair! He lied!! Fifteen years later: I’m telling you, Starship is TOO BIG! There will never be a payload for it. You’ll see!
I’d like to know where the money behind Vast is coming from.
Sometimes you can figure it out from who’s on the team. From the LinkedIn page, one of the founders is Jed McCaleb, who is a billionaire who made his money in cryptocurrency.
Yes. McCaleb is CEO of Vast. His fortune has taken a bit of a beating of late, but he’s still got roughly as much money as Jared Isaacman. He’s not Musk or Bezos rich, but he’s still plenty safe from missing any meals.
It is an interesting acquisition. Launcher has plans to build satellite servicing and debris remediation vehicles as well as “space tug” payload haulers/deployers. Servicing vehicles would be good ways for a space station company to do external maintenance/repairs without requiring EVA suits for humans. Debris remediation is something an aspiring builder of really big space stations would find very handy for advance clearing of debris threats to stations too big to juke and jive even to the limited degree the ISS can.
Should I be investing in companies that make aerogel?
Bottle suits!
Looking at the company principals, I agree about the funding sources. The space station design seems like a bad idea, but what do I know?
McCaleb is maybe the most notorious of the crypto pump and dump kings. I am not convinced this is anything other than a money laundering passion project, but he seems to have assembled a pretty darn good team. I suppose if you’re going to fisk retail investors for billions there are worse ways to spend the loot.