The company Vast, which plans to build a private space station in orbit, will receive the Launcher developments – the Orbit orbital tug and the E-2 rocket engine – as a result of the takeover.

The Launcher startup, founded in 2017 by Max Haot, attracted investments in the amount of $16.3 million and was engaged in the development of the Light rocket and the Orbiter orbital tug. In addition, the company received funding in the amount of $1.5 million from the US Air Force.

The chief designer of the startup and the team of engineers are Ukrainians who worked from the office in Dnipro until February 2022. A few days before the full-scale invasion, the team was sent to Bulgaria. One of Launcher’s leading specialists, chief designer Ihor Nikishchenko, has worked for more than 30 years at Pivdenne KB. It was in the design bureau that the startup licensed the technologies of the Zenit second-stage shunting engine – RD-8, turbo and oxygen pump. Launcher also successfully conducted the first tests of the E-2 rocket engine and its turbopump unit.

In total, the Launcher team has 80 specialists (15 of whom are Ukrainians) — all of them will transfer to the Vast team as part of the agreement, and the founder of the startup, Max Haot, will lead the expanded enterprise. Negotiations on the takeover continued in recent months, in the last round of investments for $11.7 million in June 2021, Launcher was valued at $46.7 million (including the amount of the investment).

In January 2023, the startup launched its own tugboat on a SpaceX rocket into space for the first time, which was supposed to deliver satellites to the required orbits. However, the Launcher lost contact with the Orbiter due to a malfunction of the GPS antenna and problems with orientation. The startup (already part of Vast) plans to carry out repeated launches in June and October 2023 – then the team will test subsystems and components of the space station.

Founded by billionaire and crypto-pioneer Jed McCaleb (he was also the first outside investor in Maxim Polyakov’s Firefly Aerospace rocket company), Vast focuses on building orbital laboratories. In the future, the company plans to apply for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program, under which Blue Origin and Sierra Space Orbital Reef, Voyager and Lockheed’s Starlab, as well as a third project led by Northrop Grumman, have already received funding to build space stations. designed to replace the ISS.

Source: Forbes