Every homeowner eventually runs the same math. The roof leaks, the furnace groans, and at some point fixing the old place costs more than moving out.
You probably know that moment. Maybe you hit it with a 15-year-old car or a starter home your family outgrew.
NASA hit it with a house that circles the planet about 250 miles above your head.
The International Space Station (ISS) has hosted crews nonstop since November 2000. It has housed cancer-drug experiments, astronaut health studies, and a wave of private astronaut visits.
It is also old, expensive, and scheduled to come down. The agency’s own auditors put the cost of running it at about $3 billion a year, and the current plan calls for retirement around 2030.
For years, the open question was who would build the next one. Earlier this year, NASA even floated owning a piece of it again.
That idea is now off the table. On Friday, Oct. 9, NASA released its final call for private companies to build and run the station that replaces the ISS, and the agency intends to be a paying tenant rather than the landlord.
The bids will tell you a lot about whether the commercial space economy can stand on its own.
NASA sets a December deadline for private orbital outposts
Proposals are due Tuesday, Dec. 8, with contract awards expected in spring 2027, according to NASA.
The agency plans to award firm-fixed-price contracts to two or more companies for early development, then run a second competition for final design, certification, and services, the release said.
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Winners will have to design, build, test, certify and operate their stations, plus provide end-to-end crew and cargo services.
“The opportunity is significant, but the economics ultimately have to work,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in the release.
That sentence is the whole story. NASA wants a landlord who already has other tenants lined up.
Why the agency abandoned its ISS-attached core module idea
This spring, NASA weighed buying a government-owned core module that commercial providers could dock to, arguing the market might not support stand-alone stations, reported Payload.
Station builders pushed back hard. It was on industry to prove the agency wrong, Isaacman told the outlet at the time.
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Industry apparently did. In July, the agency confirmed it would stick with its original plan to buy services through full and open competition, according to a NASA statement.
Here’s how the replacement timeline has unfolded so far:
- March 2026: NASA issued two requests for information on orbital destinations and transportation, the agency said.
- July 2026: NASA published a draft request for proposals, followed by an industry day, according to NASA.
- Oct. 9, 2026: The final request for proposals went out.
- Dec. 8, 2026: Proposals are due.
- Spring 2027: Contract awards are expected.
- 2030: The ISS is expected to retire, according to NASA’s Office of Inspector General.
The budget math behind renting a home in orbit
NASA’s current budget carries $272.3 million for the program, with roughly $2.1 billion planned across the next five years, reported Ars Technica.
The ISS, by comparison, costs about $3 billion a year to operate, according to the same inspector general audit.
When I lined those figures up, the entire five-year pot came to roughly 70% of a single year of ISS operations.
It gets tighter. NASA published estimates that a four-seat crew flight in 2030 would cost $325 million and a cargo flight $300 million, the Ars report said.
I ran that against the budget. At about $81 million a seat, NASA’s whole five-year development budget would pay for roughly six crew flights and nothing else.
So someone else has to bring the money. That someone is private capital, and in a few cases, people with a brokerage account.
Rides are a second snag. SpaceX (SPCX) has signaled it wants to retire Crew Dragon around the time the ISS comes down, so NASA offered to furnish transportation for the first four service missions, Ars reported.
Voyager, Boeing, Northrop shareholders have a stake
Most station builders are private. Axiom Space and Vast are venture-backed, and Blue Origin is owned by Jeff Bezos.
The cleanest public play is Voyager Technologies (VOYG), which owns the majority of the Starlab joint venture, according to The Space Review.
Voyager has said Starlab’s commercial payload space was fully reserved three years before launch, the same outlet reported. That is exactly the kind of non-NASA demand Isaacman says he wants to see.
Starlab has “the strongest business plan and technical solution,” Starlab Space CEO Marshall Smith told Ars Technica.
Axiom sounded just as confident. A spokesperson told the outlet the company’s proposal will show it is “the clear choice” for NASA’s orbital goals.
Bigger names have exposure, too. Northrop Grumman (NOC) joined the Starlab team after dropping its own station plan, The Space Review reported, while NASA recently added $359 million to help Boeing (BA) certify its Starliner capsule, according to Ars.
My analysis: For Northrop and Boeing, a station loss is a rounding error. For Voyager, a spring 2027 award is close to the whole thesis.
What spring 2027 contract awards could mean for investors
The stakes reach beyond tickers. I trained as a pharmacist, so one ISS experiment stuck with me.
Merck (MRK) crystallized its cancer drug Keytruda in orbit and found conditions that could support injection under the skin instead of an IV drip, according to the ISS National Lab.
A gap in American orbital lab space would stall that kind of research. NASA “will never give up its presence in low Earth orbit,” Isaacman said in the Oct. 9 release, and this procurement is how he plans to keep that promise.
Execution risk is real, too. Vast’s Haven-1, billed as the first commercial station, is now aiming for an early 2027 launch, reported Aviation Week. When Vast unveiled it in 2023, the company projected August 2025.
Space hardware rarely runs on schedule, and shareholders pay for every slip.
If you own space stocks, watch two things before spring. First, how many companies NASA picks, since two or more winners split a thin budget. Second, how much private capital each bidder commits next to NASA’s dollars.
The ISS was the government’s house for a quarter century. The next one will be a rental, and the landlord will need paying tenants who are not NASA.
So the spring question for your portfolio is simple: Who pays the mortgage?
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