WASHINGTON \u2014 The Starlab commercial space station has fully booked its commercial payload space as the joint venture developing it awaits the next phase of a NASA program.<\/p>\n
In a March 10 earnings call, Dylan Taylor, chief executive of Voyager Technologies, whose company is leading development of the station, said Starlab was seeing strong commercial demand.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am excited to share with you that Starlab\u2019s commercial payload capacity is fully reserved, providing early visibility into the future utilization and revenue potential\u201d of the station, he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a fantastic outcome given the fact that we won\u2019t be in orbit for another 36 months.\u201d<\/p>\n
He did not disclose details about how much payload space was reserved or by whom. However, the announcement coincided with a release by Starlab Space stating that Yuri, a German space biotech company, had reserved an unspecified amount of payload space on Starlab for the station\u2019s first full year of commercial operations.<\/p>\n
\u201cYuri has secured dedicated capacity for the entire first year of Starlab\u2019s operations; not a single campaign or short-duration mission, but sustained, year-round access,\u201d Brad Henderson, chief commercial officer of Starlab Space, said in the statement. \u201cStarlab was designed to support exactly this kind of persistent commercial activity, moving the market beyond episodic access and toward reliable, scalable infrastructure in space.\u201d<\/p>\n
Starlab did not disclose financial terms of the Yuri agreement or other recent announcements of companies reserving space on the station. In the earnings call, Filipe de Sousa, chief financial officer of Voyager, said the company has booked $6 million in backlog related to Starlab, \u201cwhich is quarters ahead of when I would have expected it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voyager is the largest partner in the Starlab Space joint venture, which includes Airbus, Mitsubishi, MDA Space and other companies. Voyager had a 61.9% stake in the joint venture as of the end of 2025, according to Voyager\u2019s Form 10-K filing<\/a> with the Securities and Exchange Commission March 10.<\/p>\n Work on Starlab has been supported by a NASA Space Act Agreement through the first phase of the agency\u2019s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program. Voyager said NASA has disbursed $183 million to date under the agreement, which has a total value of $218 million.<\/p>\n Starlab and other commercial stations are awaiting the next phase of the CLD program. NASA announced a revision to the program last summer, deciding to award multiple Space Act Agreements for Phase 2 that would lead to crewed demonstrations of commercial stations. However, the agency has yet to release a final call for proposals.<\/p>\n Those delays led the authors of a Senate NASA authorization bill to extend the life of the International Space Station by two years, to 2032. That bill, which also includes language directing NASA to expedite the next phase of the CLD program, cleared the Senate Commerce Committee March 4<\/a>.<\/p>\n Taylor said in the earnings call that he expected NASA to release the CLD Phase 2 request for proposals in the next 60 days.<\/p>\n \u201cWe still anticipate a downselect this year. To be more precise, it is difficult to say,\u201d he said, depending on the timing of the call for proposals and how long NASA will review them.<\/p>\n Any funding from NASA will be augmented by private investment. Starlab Space has announced investments from several firms since last fall but has not disclosed the amount raised. Those deals are part of an ongoing Series A round for Starlab Space, de Sousa said on the call.<\/p>\n Starlab\u2019s design features a large module and other components designed to be deployed on a single launch. In the company\u2019s 10-K filing, it said it has a launch contract priced at $90 million to send Starlab to orbit. The company did not name the launch provider in the filing, but Starlab Space announced in January 2024 that it had selected SpaceX\u2019s Starship to launch the station<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 The Starlab commercial space station has fully booked its commercial payload space as the joint venture…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":646947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[889,916,159,16988,783,261331,274928,67,132,68,274929],"class_list":{"0":"post-646946","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-commercial-leo-destinations","9":"tag-nasa","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-sn","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-starlab","14":"tag-starlab-space","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-voyager-space"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116208155490101888","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}