- Vast is building Haven-1, the world’s first commercial space station, set to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in early 2027 with a crew of four astronauts.
- Jed McCaleb founded Mt. Gox, the first major Bitcoin exchange, co-founded Ripple and Stellar, and has committed over $1 billion of his own fortune to Vast.
- In February 2026, NASA selected Vast for its sixth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station — the first company besides Axiom Space to win that contract.
- Vast closed a $500 million funding round in March 2026, bringing total capital raised to over $1 billion, with backers including the Qatar Investment Authority and Mitsui.
Vast has over 1,000 employees, more than $1 billion in capital, a NASA contract, and a space station entering its final integration phase in Long Beach, California. If everything goes according to plan, Haven-1 will be orbiting Earth by early 2027 — the first privately built, free-flying commercial station in history.
The man behind it is Jed McCaleb, a 50-year-old programmer from Arkansas who has already shaped the trajectories of peer-to-peer file sharing, Bitcoin, and cross-border payments. Each time, he built something that changed an industry — and then walked away to build something bigger. Space is his latest bet, and by far his most expensive.
A Programmer From Arkansas Who Dropped Out of Berkeley
McCaleb was born in 1975 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He started writing code in elementary school — third or fourth grade, by his own account. By high school, programming wasn’t a hobby. It was the only thing that held his attention.
He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out during his freshman year. The classroom moved too slowly. McCaleb relocated to New York City and started working as a developer, drawn to the unstructured, fast-moving world of the early internet.
”I’ve always enjoyed reading technical books about asteroid mining and other space concepts. Friends made fun of me, but I knew eventually I’m going to do this.”
The ambition was already there. But the path to space would take two decades, three industries, and several billion dollars.
eDonkey2000: Millions of Users, Then a $30 Million Settlement
In 2000, McCaleb created eDonkey2000, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network that rivaled Napster and LimeWire. At its peak, eDonkey had millions of users swapping music, movies, and software across the globe. It was one of the most-used file-sharing protocols on the planet.
Then the music industry came calling. The RIAA sued, and in 2006 McCaleb’s company settled for $30 million and shut the network down. It was a brutal ending — but also a masterclass in building products that spread on their own. McCaleb had learned how to create systems that scaled without permission.
Mt. Gox, Ripple, and Stellar: Three Bets That Reshaped Crypto
In 2007, McCaleb purchased the domain mtgox.com — originally intended as a trading card site for Magic: The Gathering. By 2010, he had repurposed it into the world’s first major Bitcoin exchange. Within months, Mt. Gox was handling the majority of all Bitcoin transactions on Earth.
McCaleb sold Mt. Gox to Mark Karpeles in February 2011, well before the exchange’s catastrophic 2014 hack and collapse. He had already moved on.
By 2011, he was developing Ripple, a protocol that verified digital currency transactions through network consensus rather than mining. He recruited the founding team, brought in CEO Chris Larsen, and left the company in 2013. A year later, he co-founded the Stellar Development Foundation with Joyce Kim — an open-source protocol designed for cross-border payments between fiat and digital currencies.
”It’s super important that people take this leap from where we are today to this potential world where there’s a lot of people living off the Earth.”
Over the following years, McCaleb gradually sold his 9 billion XRP tokens, completing the process in 2022. The proceeds — estimated at several billion dollars — gave him the financial firepower to pursue the project he had been thinking about since childhood.
2021: A Crypto Billionaire Founds a Space Station Company
Vast was incorporated in 2021 with a single, audacious goal: build artificial gravity space stations and expand humanity beyond the solar system. McCaleb funded it himself. No venture capital. No board pressure. No quarterly earnings calls.
The logic was deliberate. McCaleb wanted to move fast and keep the vision intact — and that meant keeping outside investors at arm’s length.
He hired engineers, leased office space, and started designing Haven-1, a single-module station that would serve as a proof of concept for everything that would follow. In February 2023, Vast acquired Launcher, a Hawthorne-based rocket startup, tripling its workforce overnight to 120 engineers and gaining access to propulsion technology and a 115,000-square-foot headquarters in Long Beach.
Haven-1: A Space Station Built Like a Startup
By May 2023, Vast had signed a launch contract with SpaceX. Haven-1 would ride a Falcon 9 to orbit, and a Crew Dragon capsule would ferry four astronauts to the station for a 30-day mission.
McCaleb ran the company like a software startup — small teams, rapid iteration, minimal bureaucracy. The approach mirrored SpaceX’s own philosophy, and it was no coincidence.
”We’re never going to learn how to do this until we start doing it. SpaceX has shown that if you can move fast and be aggressive, that’s actually a good way to achieve these really great things with hardware.”
By mid-2025, Haven-1’s primary structure was complete. Testing began at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Glenn Research Center. The station entered its final integration phase, on track for a launch window in early 2027.
$500 Million, a NASA Contract, and 1,000 Employees
In February 2026, NASA selected Vast for its sixth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station — breaking Axiom Space’s monopoly on the program. The contract gave Vast something no amount of private funding could buy: operational credibility with the U.S. government.
A month later, Vast closed a $500 million funding round — $300 million in equity, $200 million in debt — led by Balerion Space Ventures, with the Qatar Investment Authority, Mitsui, Nikon, and McCaleb himself participating. Total capital raised crossed the $1 billion mark. The company now employs over 1,000 people.
The Man Who Keeps Building the Next Thing
McCaleb has never stayed anywhere long. He built eDonkey, then left. He created Mt. Gox, then sold it. He co-founded Ripple, then departed. He launched Stellar, then shifted his focus. Each venture was bigger, more ambitious, and more consequential than the last.
Vast is different — because there is nowhere bigger to go. The ISS is aging out. NASA needs commercial partners. And McCaleb has the capital, the team, and the contract to be one of the companies that replaces it. Haven-1 is not a vanity project. It is the opening move in a decades-long bet that humans will live and work in orbit as routinely as they do on the ground.
The kid from Arkansas who dropped out of Berkeley and built the internet’s biggest file-sharing network is now building a space station. The pattern hasn’t changed. The scale has.
