Fighting for Commercial Space Stations

Sean Mahoney
3 hours ago
6 min read

The next space stations won't be designed, built, and operated by NASA. They will be built by American companies - if Washington lets it happen. The Space Frontier Foundation responded to NASA's CLD RFI last month, and here is what we said. Now we need your support to win this fight.

A Moment That Matters

Right now, in Washington, D.C., a decision is being made that will define the future of human spaceflight in Low Earth Orbit for a generation.

The International Space Station retires in 2030. That's not a rumor or a distant forecast - it's a hard deadline, confirmed by every projection and analysis NASA has published. When the ISS is deorbited, the United States will either have commercial space stations ready to host American astronauts, scientists, and entrepreneurs in low Earth orbit, or we will have nothing. No backup. No overlapping transition preserving American human presence in orbit.

Yet another unnecessary gap.

For our entire history, the Space Frontier Foundation has advocated for the economic development and human settlement of space… in the media, in popular culture, and here in our nation’s capital. We are not a company or a trade association. We are there because of you, because we want your voice to be heard when the President, Congress, and federal agencies make space development policy.

What Happened

During March Storm 2026, we heard NASA was preparing a major announcement about implementing President Trump’s December Executive Order on Space Superiority. We blocked out March 24, 2026 on our calendars with real optimism. We watched NASA’s Ignition event, excited by the proposed Lunar base. But then Jared announced proposed changes to NASA’s Commercial LEO Destination (CLD) program. And our collective jaws dropped open.

NASA was retreating from commercializing low earth orbit (LEO), declaring there wasn’t a big enough market to support commercial space stations, and was planning to cut its investment in CLD partnerships by several hundred million dollars over the next five years. Ignoring the vigorous competition among several U.S.-led commercial teams and at least $2 billion in private capital already invested. But the worst idea? They proposed adding another government-owned module to the ISS that would allow commercial companies to temporarily dock with it, and then separating this module from the ISS when the ISS is decommissioned, creating a new government-owned and -run space station core… aka ISS 2.0.

WHAT THE HELL????

How we got here

For decades, the Foundation has fought for commercializing Earth orbit. We proposed replacing Space Station Freedom with commercial platforms in the early 1990s. Then we proposed adding commercial services and modules to the new ISS to create “Alphatown”. In 1995, our President, Rick Tumlinson, testified in support of using commercial transportation services to support ISS. After a lot of bruising battles to start Commercial Orbital Transport Services (COTS), fund it, start Commercial Crew, and fund it, we finally saw SpaceX deliver humans to ISS in 2020. But nine long years had passed between the last Shuttle flight and the first Crew Dragon mission.

Over a decade ago, we began arguing for a “transition plan” from ISS to what we hoped would be a free-enterprise solution. We argued and ultimately got Congressional and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) buy-in to mandate a transition plan. In 2019, a plan finally emerged, and in 2021, NASA awarded three funded Space Act Agreements for free-flying CLDs to join a fixed-price contract for an ISS augmentation module that could later serve as the core of a CLD. We were replicating the successful COTS and Commercial Crew partnerships… and this time faster.

NASA is now turning its back on that progress, which postponed large-scale space development of Earth orbit for decades. Fortunately, NASA published a Request for Information (RFI) to seek public input on the new strategy. Our policy team, led by Jim Muncy and Aaron Oesterle, leaped into action and produced a forceful response (download the RFI.)

What we told NASA

Our paper, "A Path Forward for Commercial LEO Destinations," makes three core arguments.

The mandate to replace ISS with commercial stations is clear. NASA needs to comply.

Public Law 115-10 (2017) established that NASA must transition from a LEO operator to a paying customer. The December 2025 Executive Order made commercial ISS replacements a key economic policy goal. The President’s FY2026 and FY2027 budgets both mandate multiple CLD partnerships. The question is not whether this transition is going to happen, it’s when… with the key variable being whether NASA helps or resists. The ISS paradigm will kill this opportunity if NASA applies it.

ISS was built as a geopolitical experiment in building space-station-like things, not a commercial enterprise. Its requirements culture - human-rating standards developed for government spacecraft, design specifications instead of performance-based standards, and NASA retaining operational control over platforms it doesn't own - adds cost and schedule without creating the commercial environment that entrepreneurship requires.

The Foundation has been to this party before. In 1999, a company called MirCorp – which was conceived at an SFF conference – became the first private enterprise to successfully operate a crewed space station. NASA and the State Department fought against it. Mir was deorbited in 2001. MirCorp closed in 2003. We raised this in our RFI response, not as an old grievance but as institutional documentation - this is what happens when agencies treat commercial alternatives as competitors rather than partners and successors.

The CLD program is structurally underfunded - and that's a strategic problem, not just a budgetary one.

NASA's FY2027 request for CLD is $300m, rising to $600m, totaling $1.8B in four years. That's already just a fraction of independent cost estimates for a single commercial station ($3–10 billion or more). And now NASA is saying they may only provide $250m a year until ISS is orbited. A 40+% cut isn't a rounding error and isn't neutral: it sends a market signal that the government is not a reliable partner, which makes private capital formation harder. The very market conditions NASA is trying to catalyze are undermined by NASA's own budget behavior.

Our six specific recommendations:

Multi-year minimum purchase guarantees - annual appropriations don't constitute a commitment.
A customer requirements document limited to outcomes, not architecture or design.
A joint government-industry working group to produce a streamlined commercial human rating standard.
Immediate Funded Space Act Agreements for the most advanced providers.
A Phase 2 competition designed to sustain at least two providers to operational status.
A commercial advisory council with actual access to program documentation and a mandate to publish findings.

We also took a clear position on the central strategic debate: the direct-to-commercial station approach is clearly superior to the phased transition. The phased path extends NASA's operational dependencies, delays commercial operators from serving non-NASA customers, and signals to investors that the government isn't ready to commit. COTS is the model that worked. The paper argues NASA should do it again.

Why This Kind of Work Needs Your Support

But it’s not enough to tell NASA what to do once. We need to rally allies in Congress and the Administration, and the American people, to remind NASA that they work for us. That’s where you come in.

The Foundation has plans to engage on this issue. Direct lobbying and citizen lobbying events focused exclusively on supporting commercial space stations.

That work costs money. Almost all of us are volunteers, most of whom have over a decade of experience in commercial space policy. Muncy has been doing this stuff for 45 years! But we need some paid staff time, event logistics, document production, and outreach - none of it happens without resources. And right now, at this moment in the CLD program's history, the window for advocacy to make a real difference is wide open. NASA's program structure, its requirements approach, its funding request - these are all in active deliberation. The decisions being made this spring and summer will shape what commercial LEO looks like for the next decade.

If you believe commercial space stations are worth fighting for, this is the moment to help us fight. 👉 Donate to support SFF's Commercial Space Station work!

Donate Now

Your support keeps our team engaged in Washington - at hearings, inside Hill offices, on the public record and in social media. You can read our full RFI response (SpaceFrontierFoundation_LEODestinationRFI.pdf) attached below.

If you want to talk directly about our work, reach out to Aaron Oesterle at aaron.oesterle@spacefrontier.org.

America’s next space stations are being decided now. We're at the table. Help us win.