With the International Space Station due to retire around 2030, NASA has asked American companies to build and run its successors. The final solicitation reveals an agency that wants to buy a service, not own a laboratory, and the clock is tight. India, building its own station, should watch closely.
People have lived aboard the International Space Station without a break since November 2000. That unbroken run is scheduled to end around 2030, when the ageing complex is to be guided into the Pacific Ocean. On 9 October NASA took the most consequential step so far towards what comes next, releasing the final request for proposals for the second phase of its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations programme. The competition, featured by Aviation Week & Space Technology in its issue of 19 October, will decide which privately owned space stations the agency rents room on in the 2030s.
What NASA is asking for
The solicitation invites American companies to design, build, test, certify and operate commercial stations, and to provide an end-to-end service that includes carrying astronauts there and back. Proposals are due on 8 December 2026, and NASA expects to award contracts in the spring of 2027.
The structure is staged. The agency plans to select two or more contractors for early development work. A later, separately competed task order will cover final design, testing, certification and the actual services, and will go to one or more of them. The contracts are firm-fixed-price and of the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity type, meaning that NASA commits to a framework and orders specific work as it goes.
From landlord to tenant
The philosophy is the same one that produced commercial cargo and crew flights to the existing station. Instead of owning the hardware, NASA intends to be one customer among several, buying crew time and research capacity from operators who can also sell to other space agencies, companies and private astronauts. In theory this lowers the cost to the taxpayer and frees the agency’s budget for missions to the Moon and Mars. The NASA Administrator, Jared Isaacman, has framed the effort as essential to keeping a continuous American presence in low Earth orbit.
The case for staying in orbit at all rests on work that cannot be done elsewhere: long-duration studies of the human body in weightlessness, testing of life-support systems for deep-space voyages, materials and pharmaceutical research, and the training of crews.
A strategy that changed twice
The path to this solicitation has not been straight. The first phase began in 2021, when NASA signed funded agreements worth a combined 415 million dollars or so with teams led by Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman to mature station designs, alongside a separate arrangement with Axiom Space for modules attached to the existing station.
A second phase built on fixed-price contracts was approved in late 2024. Then, in July 2025, an internal directive reversed course, citing a budget shortfall estimated at four billion dollars. It replaced the contracts with lighter funded partnerships aimed at a crewed demonstration. The 2026 solicitation returns to fixed-price contracts for certification and services, following information requests in March, a draft in July and consultations with industry.
The reversals matter because every station developer has had to plan its financing around a customer whose intentions kept shifting. Private investors want to know how much business the anchor tenant will bring, and for how long.
The risk of a gap
The schedule is the central worry. Contracts awarded in spring 2027 leave roughly three years before the planned retirement of the existing station. Building, launching and certifying a crewed outpost in that time would be fast by any historical standard. Reporting on the July draft indicated that NASA hoped to see crewed flight tests by 2029.
If no certified commercial station is ready, the United States would face a period without a permanent foothold in low Earth orbit while China continues to operate its Tiangong station. Extending the life of the present station is possible only up to a point, since its oldest modules have been in space for more than a quarter of a century.
There is a commercial uncertainty as well. The business case for private stations assumes customers beyond NASA: other governments, pharmaceutical and materials companies, and tourism. That demand is real but unproven at the scale needed to sustain two or more orbiting facilities. A fixed-price arrangement shifts cost risk to the companies, which is attractive to the government but has in other programmes led contractors to absorb heavy losses.
What it means for India
India has a direct interest. Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the International Space Station in mid-2025 on a privately organised Axiom mission, the first Indian to visit it, and the experience fed into preparations for the Gaganyaan human spaceflight programme. India has also announced its own Bharatiya Antariksh Station, with the first module targeted for 2028 and completion by 2035.
The emerging American model offers India both a market and a comparison. As a customer, the Indian Space Research Organisation could buy astronaut time or experiment slots on commercial stations in the years before its own outpost is complete, much as it did through Axiom. As a builder, India will have to decide whether its station is run purely as a government facility or opened to paying users, Indian start-ups and partner nations. And as a supplier, Indian companies that already manufacture launch-vehicle and satellite hardware could compete for components and services in a supply chain that will be commercial from the outset.
There is also a lesson in the turbulence. NASA’s changes of direction show how difficult it is to hand human spaceflight infrastructure to the market while keeping schedules. India’s own plan has the advantage of a single owner, and the corresponding burden of funding it steadily.
What to watch
The names of the bidders will become clear after 8 December, and the awards next spring will show how many stations NASA believes the market can support. The decisive test will come later: whether any of them is ready to receive a crew before the old station makes its final descent.
– Ramesh M U V
