Notably, in the new documents, NASA assigns an explicit price to crew and cargo missions. For 2030, it estimates a four-seat crew flight will cost $325 million, and a cargo flight $300 million. In offering to furnish these initial flights, NASA is taking a significant burden off private space station providers, which are already undertaking a challenging task in constructing, testing, and flying orbital space stations.

Early industry reactions

The potential bidders were still reviewing the lengthy proposal on Friday afternoon, but several offered their initial thoughts on the new NASA documents.

“The release of the RFP is an important milestone,” Marshall Smith, the chief executive of Voyager’s Starlab space station, said. “We appreciate that NASA has incorporated both industry and government feedback. We believe Starlab has the strongest business plan and technical solution to be America’s next space station and we look forward to competing.”

Axiom Space said it also welcomed the release of the final RFP.

“Our team is actively reviewing the RFP now and is energized for the next steps in the process,” an Axiom Space spokesperson said. “With years of experience executing human space flight missions and developing orbital hardware, we are confident the proposal we provide NASA will demonstrate that Axiom Space is the clear choice to meet NASA’s objectives in low-Earth orbit.”

Vast, too, said it was prepared to move forward with the competition.

“Vast looks forward to competing for the opportunity to build the commercial successor to the ISS,” a company spokesperson said. “We’re in final integration with Haven-1 and ready to keep building towards a multi-module station capable of supporting a continuous human presence.”