- Vast is building Haven-1, the world’s first commercial space station, set to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in 2026-2027 with a team of over 1,000 employees in Long Beach, California.
- Max Haot is a Belgian-American serial entrepreneur who founded Livestream, Mevo, and Launcher before becoming CEO of Vast in 2023.
- Haot founded Launcher in 2017 to build 3D-printed rocket engines in Brooklyn, and the company was acquired by Vast in February 2023.
- Vast raised $500 million in March 2026 and is backed by Jed McCaleb, who has committed over $1 billion of his personal fortune to the venture.
A 1,000-Person Team Racing to Replace the ISS
Vast employs more than 1,000 people across a 189,000-square-foot campus in Long Beach, California. The company is building Haven-1 — a single-module commercial space station that, at 14,000 kilograms, will be the heaviest spacecraft ever launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9. Behind it is Haven-2, designed as the successor to the International Space Station under NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program.
At the helm is Max Haot, a 46-year-old Belgian-American who has founded, scaled, and sold four companies before landing at the intersection of 3D printing and orbital infrastructure. His path from Brussels to Long Beach runs through live video, consumer cameras, rocket engines, and a bet-everything conviction that space needs builders, not slide decks.
A Belgian Kid Who Wanted to Make Television
Haot grew up in Belgium with an early obsession: live television. Not watching it — making it. He wanted to be a TV director. A chance internship at IMG’s TV division in London in 1995, when he was still a teenager, changed the trajectory. He found himself drawn not to the cameras but to the technology behind the broadcast — the servers, the streams, the infrastructure that made live video possible.
He never went to university. By 20, he was leading a team of 100 engineers specializing in large-scale video streaming. The internet was still young, and Haot saw what most media executives missed: that live video would eventually belong to everyone, not just networks with satellite trucks and million-dollar budgets.
Livestream: A TV Studio in the Cloud
In 2007, Haot co-founded Livestream, originally called Mogulus, in New York. The pitch was radical for its time — a cloud-based TV studio that let anyone broadcast live without technical expertise. Churches, startups, conference organizers, activists — anyone with a webcam could go live to a global audience.
”We wanted to democratize live video the way blogging had democratized the written word.” — Max Haot
Livestream grew into one of the dominant enterprise live video platforms of the 2010s. Along the way, Haot also created Mevo, a compact connected camera designed for mobile live streaming. In 2017, he sold Livestream to IAC/Vimeo. Two years later, he bought back the Mevo business, then sold it again — this time to Logitech in 2021.
Four companies built, four companies sold. Most founders would have retired to an advisory board. Haot went to Brooklyn and started building rockets.
A Rocket Engine Printed in a Week
Haot founded Launcher in 2017 with a thesis that sounded absurd to most aerospace veterans: that 3D printing could produce rocket engines faster and cheaper than any traditional method. Working from a small facility in Brooklyn, his team partnered with AMCM in Germany and Velo3D to produce the E-2, a liquid oxygen/kerosene engine generating 10 tonnes of thrust — the largest single-piece 3D-printed rocket engine in the world at the time.
”Paper design and PowerPoints are not substitutes for doing the real thing.” — Max Haot
The E-2 was printed in roughly a week. Launcher’s Rocket-1 design called for four E-2 engines on the first stage and one vacuum-sealed variant on the second. The company raised Air Force funding through a pitch competition and grew to 40 employees. It was small, scrappy, and technically ambitious — exactly the kind of team that caught the attention of Jed McCaleb.
The Vast Acquisition That Changed Everything
In February 2023, Vast — founded by cryptocurrency pioneer Jed McCaleb with the goal of building commercial space stations with artificial gravity — acquired Launcher. Haot joined as president, bringing his 40-person team into Vast’s 80-person operation. The combined company set up in a new 115,000-square-foot headquarters in Long Beach.
Within months, McCaleb handed Haot the CEO title. The logic was clear: McCaleb had the vision and the capital — he has committed over $1 billion of his personal fortune — but Haot had the operational instinct of someone who had built and shipped products four times over. Vast needed a builder, not a visionary. It got both.
”If we don’t win the NASA contract, we don’t think we can even exist. It’s a matter of survival.” — Max Haot
$500 Million, 1,000 Engineers, and a Station in Orbit
The pace since then has been relentless. Vast completed structural testing on Haven-1 in late 2025 and launched Haven Demo — a pathfinder mission that made Vast the only commercial space station company to fly and operate its own spacecraft. In March 2026, the company closed $500 million in new funding from investors including the Qatar Investment Authority, Nikon, Mitsui, and McCaleb himself. The team has grown past 1,000 people.
Haven-1 is designed to host up to four crew members for missions lasting at least 10 days, with up to four crewed visits over its three-year lifespan. In December 2024, Vast announced a deal with SpaceX to launch two crewed missions to the ISS — a strategic move to build operational credibility before NASA selects its Commercial LEO Destinations partners.
The Man Who Keeps Building
Haot’s career reads like a series of bets that shouldn’t have worked. A Belgian teenager with no degree leading 100 engineers. A live video startup launched before most people had broadband. A Brooklyn rocket company printing engines that aerospace giants said couldn’t be printed. And now, a commercial space station that needs to beat Boeing and Northrop Grumman to a NASA contract worth billions.
The thread connecting all of it is the same instinct: build the thing, ship it, prove it works. Vast’s Haven-2 is already in planning as the proposed successor to the ISS, with components expected to start launching around 2028. The long-term goal — a rotating station with artificial gravity — is a 10-to-20-year project that will require far more capital than even McCaleb’s fortune can provide.
But Haot has never waited for conditions to be perfect. He has always built first and figured out the rest later. The next two years will determine whether that approach works at orbital scale.
