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On Nov. 2, 2000, the Soyuz TM-31 spacecraft docked with the Zvezda module of the International Space Station. On board were Roscosmos cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev and NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd. They were known as Expedition 1, the first long-term crew to live on the ISS.
Since their arrival, there have always been people on the ISS, a continuous presence that is by far the longest in the history of spaceflight. NASA had planned to celebrate 25 years of humans on the ISS this fall, but the federal government shutdown that started Oct. 1 largely canceled those plans.
Even before the shutdown, though, celebrations of the anniversary were overshadowed by questions regarding NASA’s long-term future in low Earth orbit (LEO). Barring some kind of emergency, the station will remain occupied through the end of the decade, at which point NASA would shift to one or more commercial stations whose development the agency has been supporting.
However, a change in policy has put that smooth transition into question. Rather than an overlap, there may be a gap in time between the end of ISS operations and its commercial successors’ debut. Moreover, there is no guarantee that, even when those commercial stations are ready, NASA will use them continuously, instead potentially opting for shorter-term missions with gaps in between.
“It would be catastrophic from a diplomatic presence if we didn’t have a permanent human presence in space. It would be catastrophic from a science perspective,” former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Oct. 21. He was speaking at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies marking the 25th anniversary of permanent crews on the ISS.
Others, like Phil McAlister, who retired from NASA early this year after nearly 20 years at NASA Headquarters, where he served as director of the agency’s commercial space division that oversaw the CLD program, are less worried.
“The way some people refer to a potential ‘gap’ in continuous U.S. human presence in space, you’d think it was the title of a new horror movie,” he wrote in one of a series of essays published on LinkedIn supporting the agency’s revised CLD strategy.
Now, businesses and civil space leaders are trying to determine what humans’ presence in space will look like for the next five to 10 years, if we have one at all, and who will build the space stations where they live.
Change in policy
Before the end of July, NASA was gearing up for what it called Phase 2 of its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program, designed to support companies building their own space stations. Under Phase 1, NASA provided funded Space Act Agreements to Blue Origin and Starlab Space, the joint venture led by Voyager Space, to mature the designs of their proposed space stations. NASA had a separate agreement with Axiom Space that gave the company access to an ISS docking port to attach commercial station modules, while several other companies pursuing space stations had unfunded agreements where NASA provided technology support.
Phase 2, which would be open to those companies and others, would provide fixed-price contracts to one or more companies to cover certification of those commercial space stations for NASA astronauts and initial use of them. The request for proposals (RFP) for Phase 2 was scheduled for release by the end of September, although as of July NASA had not offered a draft version for industry comment.
A NASA policy directive signed July 31 by the agency’s new acting administrator, Sean Duffy, changed those plans. “To meet the goals of a commercial system within the proposed budget, a modification to the current approach for LEO platforms is required,” the memo stated. He cited projections in the administration’s 2026 budget proposal that $2.1 billion would be available for the CLD program through 2030.
The memo revealed that a NASA acquisition panel approved the next phase of the CLD program last December despite a projected funding shortfall of $4 billion, which the agency had not previously discussed. The program was deemed a “high-risk acquisition” because NASA would need to request more funding.
The revised plan would do away with a fixed-price contract and instead use another round of funded Space Act Agreements for at least two companies. Those agreements would support companies through the development of their proposed space stations, concluding with an “in-space crewed demonstration.”
The memo, perhaps more significantly, appeared to back away from having a continuous human presence in orbit. “The end capability (previously called Full Operational Capability) originally required by NASA will no longer be binding,” it stated.
NASA had previously defined Full Operational Capability of having four people, including two NASA astronauts, on a station continuously.
“The minimum capability required will be for 4 crew for 1-month increments,” the directive stated. Since it was unlikely any station would be changing out crews every month — transportation is one of the biggest costs of running the ISS, and likely will be for commercial successors — NASA appeared to be abandoning a permanent human presence in LEO.
NASA’s goals
NASA released Sept. 5 a draft solicitation for the revised CLD Phase 2, now called Commercial Destinations – Development and Demonstration Objectives. It revealed that the flight demonstration mentioned in the directive would be a four-person crew going to the commercial station for a minimum of 30 days, the minimum capability cited in that memo. The goal is to fly that demonstration mission by 2030.
At an industry event three days later, Angela Hart, manager of the CLD program at NASA, argued that despite the language about minimum mission durations in the directive and the procurement, the agency was not giving up on long-duration missions.
“I would not say that NASA has fully shifted to monthly crew rotations,” she said. “It is not NASA’s long-term goal to have only a one-month mission.”
NASA hasn’t outlined how it would shift to longer missions or a continuous presence, something that would be procured in a future third phase of the CLD program. But Hart acknowledged there could be a gap between the ISS and commercial stations, with the schedule for retiring the ISS decoupled from that for commercial stations.
“Our development plans are not tied to the ISS lifetime or deorbit decisions, although NASA is very interested in reducing a gap, if at all possible,” she said. “The two are no longer tied. There isn’t a decision point that says when we have a CLD, we will end ISS.”
Industry reactions
NASA’s change in plans for the CLD program took industry off guard, as companies had assumed NASA would maintain a continuous presence in LEO.
“The directive coming out caught everyone by surprise,” Tejpaul Bhatia, former chief executive of Axiom Space, said in an interview. He was speaking about his company’s Sept. 25 announcement that it would buy solar arrays from Redwire for its first commercial space station module.
As companies digested the policy change and reviewed the draft solicitation, they avoided, at least publicly, making any major changes in their approaches.
“You’re not going to see any massive changes coming out of us,” Bhatia said. The company had revised its assembly plan for Axiom Station last year, creating a standalone station with its first two modules, an approach he said “aligns pretty well” with the intent of the directive.
Axiom, though, made changes to its leadership. It announced Oct. 15 that it replaced Bhatia, who had been chief executive for less than six months, with Jonathan Cirtain, formerly an executive with nuclear technology firm BWXT. The company described the move only as a “strategic leadership change to advance the company’s development of critical space infrastructure” without elaborating.
Other station developers are staying the course for now. “We were going to fly in the time frame that they’re talking about, so we’re not particularly worried about that,” said Marshall Smith, chief executive of Starlab Space, referring to a launch by 2029 of its large single-module station on SpaceX’s Starship.
He spoke in the company’s booth at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, designed to show off the scale of Starlab. The exhibit featured a cylinder eight meters across, the same diameter as the station, and the height of one of the station’s three floors.
His concern was that the shift to Space Act Agreements put more of a burden on companies. For commercial crew, he noted, NASA covered about 90% of the cost. “This time around, they’re asking for quite a bit more industry input: 60% to 70%,” he said. “So, to do that, investors need government commitment.”
That commitment is delayed, he said, because NASA proposes to select several companies for Space Act Agreements, pushing back the service contracts to use the stations that would spur private investment in them.
He was also not a fan of the 30-day demo mission NASA included in the draft solicitation. “I’ll be blunt,” he said when asked if he saw any value in such a demo, “no, I do not. We’re very confident in our approach and what we’re doing, and we have a way we would go forward. I think that’s true for other providers. Just let everybody bid what makes sense.”
Many in the industry saw the inclusion of the 30-day demo mission requirement as favoring Vast. That company is currently building Haven-1, a single module space station designed to support four-person crews for a total of 40 days. Vast envisioned flying four 10-day missions to Haven-1 but has stated it could consider alternatives, like a 10-day and a 30-day mission.
Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, said in an interview during World Space Business Week that the company was considering using Haven-1 to conduct that demo mission. “We have in front of us a really clear new CLD directive from NASA asking for a 30-day demonstration,” he said. “That might impact Haven-1. We’re still deciding.”
He said he generally supported the new directive, arguing it would speed up the CLD program just as it appeared it was lagging while continuing competition among two or more companies. Unlike Smith, he supported the proposed 30-day demonstration as a step toward longer missions.
“If they said, ‘No, we need to see the first mission being six months or eight months,’ all you do is you delay when you see that,” he argued, because of the need to immediately develop more robust life support systems. “So, 30 days as a first stepping stone to get us quicker to permanently crewed capability is, I think, reasonable.”
Haot said that Vast has not yet altered its approach to Haven-2, the larger multi-module station it plans to develop to serve NASA’s long-term requirements. That could change, he added, once NASA finalizes those requirements.
In a talk at the Global Aerospace Summit, he emphasized that Vast was interested in supporting long-duration missions for NASA and others.
“What are we selling? The number one thing we’re selling is missions on orbit, seats and time in a space station,” he said. “We are incentivized and we want to sell the U.S. government full-year occupancy instead of 30 days.”
Does a gap matter?
Those companies and others provided feedback to NASA in mid-September on the draft solicitation. NASA had planned to release a final version in early October, but the government shutdown has delayed that.
With a lack of updated guidance, there remains a wide range of opinions on NASA’s plans and the potential for a gap in U.S. human presence in LEO. Some remain worried that any gap could cede leadership in LEO to China.
Among them is Bridenstine, the former NASA administrator. At risk would be the potential science and technology development benefits that come from microgravity research on the station. “If we deorbit the International Space Station and don’t have what comes next, China is going to have it and we won’t.”
“Everybody in Congress needs to be aware of that, and they need to start funding commercial LEO destinations at the level it needs to be funded,” said Bridenstine, who now serves on the board of Starlab Space.
Others, though, are less worried about any gap. A gap is not ideal, McAlister wrote, but also not “existentially bad” as long as it leads to a shift to commercial stations he believes are more sustainable than the ISS. He cited as proof the experience of the previous gap in human spaceflight between the space shuttle and commercial crew vehicles.
He was notably skeptical of geopolitical arguments against a post-ISS gap.
“Did we surrender human space transportation to the Russians forever just because we bought Soyuz during the previous gap?” he said. “No, we didn’t, and now the U.S. human space transportation capability is the most modern, cost-effective capability on the planet.”
This is not the first time NASA has considered a gap in human presence in LEO. Last October, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said at the IAC in Milan NASA was pondering whether to pursue keeping humans in space continuously — what she called “continuous heartbeat” — or instead “continuous capability,” where NASA and commercial partners would maintain the ability to send humans to LEO but without having them there all the time.
The latter could be an option, she said then, if commercial stations initially had limited capabilities. “We didn’t build the space station overnight and they won’t either, so they will have limited capabilities to start with,” she noted then.
In a LEO Microgravity Strategy document NASA released in December, the agency opted for continuous heartbeat. Melroy said in an interview after the strategy’s release, just weeks before leaving the agency, that her earlier comments at IAC were deliberately provocative.
“I did that on purpose because we needed people to come back and tell us what they thought,” she said. “If you were sitting on the sidelines with an opinion, it flushed everybody out.” The feedback, she said then, was nearly unanimous in support of continuous heartbeat.
However, the CLD directive Duffy signed at the end of July also declared that the LEO Microgravity Strategy is no longer binding, in effect reopening the debate of continuous heartbeat versus continuous capability.
While the 25th anniversary of human occupation of the ISS will largely be uncelebrated, there will still be a chance to mark the 30th anniversary, perhaps with one of the station’s last crews on board. Whether that streak survives the end of the ISS, though, remains uncertain.
This article first appeared in the November 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title “(Don’t) mind the gap.”
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