The Designer of the iPhone Is Now Designing Real Estate That Floats in Orbit

Vast has hired the Apple veteran behind nearly two decades of iPhones, iPads, and Macs to design the interior of a space station, and the real estate analysts circling the deal are already assigning it a hospitality tier.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-06-18

In December 2023, Peter Russell-Clarke left Apple after almost twenty years on the design team built under Jony Ive, a tenure that put his name on more than a thousand patents covering the iMac, the iPod Nano, the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air, and the architecture of Apple Park itself. Within weeks he had a new client: Vast, a Long Beach aerospace startup building Haven-1, a single-module commercial space station that aims to become the first standalone private outpost in low Earth orbit when it launches on a SpaceX Falcon 9 no earlier than May 2026. Russell-Clarke is not consulting on rocketry or life support chemistry. He is doing interiors, and the results read less like a NASA module than a boutique hotel that happens to be pressurized against a vacuum.

A Consumer Electronics Designer Takes On Zero Gravity

Vast announced Russell-Clarke's appointment as an Industrial Design Advisor in December 2023, and the company's framing was unambiguous about what it was buying: not aerospace credentials, but the design language that made Apple products feel inevitable. Russell-Clarke had been part of the small team of industrial designers under Ive since 2005, after Apple approached him following a career that included running his own studio with clients like Nike and Swatch and a stint as Global Group Design Manager at Nokia, overseeing teams across five countries. He holds a master's degree in industrial design from the Royal College of Art in London and a bachelor's from RMIT in Melbourne, and he now chairs the Board of Trustees for the Royal College of Art USA.

His brief at Vast was to solve a problem the space industry has mostly ignored: occupants of the International Space Station have spent twenty-five years living inside what is, by his own industry's standards, an unfinished interior. Cables run exposed along walls. Storage is improvised. The aesthetic is best described as industrial necessity, because every gram and every surface had to justify itself to engineers who were optimizing for launch mass, not occupant comfort. Russell-Clarke's job was to ask what happens when comfort becomes a design requirement rather than an afterthought. "Astronauts living in zero gravity pose unique design challenges," he said when Vast unveiled the finished interior in October 2024. "Creating an environment that is both highly efficient and naturally comforting leads to totally new results."

The results, unveiled alongside Hillary Coe, Vast's Chief Design and Marketing Officer and a design veteran of SpaceX, Starlink, Google, and Apple, lean on warm earth tones, padded surfaces, and fire-resistant maple wood veneer slats in the common area, a material choice the company says is a first for any space station interior. A centralized domed window over a meter wide anchors the module, engineered to survive repeated "kick tests" simulating hundreds of pounds of force from astronauts bumping into it while floating. Andrew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut with more than 225 days logged in orbit who now serves as Vast's lead astronaut, says the goal was to fix what experience on the ISS exposed as failures of human-centered design. "Intuitive design isn't a luxury in that regard," Feustel said. "It's key to ensuring astronauts can work and live in space seamlessly."

Forty-Five Cubic Meters, Four Tenants, Ten-Day Leases

Haven-1's entire pressurized volume comes in at roughly 45 cubic meters, a figure the British Broadcasting Corporation's science desk has compared to the interior of a small tour bus and that maps, in real estate terms, onto roughly the footprint of a generously sized American kitchen. Into that volume, Vast is fitting four private crew quarters, a common area, a microgravity research lab with ten payload slots, integrated fitness equipment, and a retractable dining table. Each crew quarter is slightly larger than its ISS equivalent and includes built-in storage, a vanity, and what Vast calls a patent-pending inflatable sleep system: astronauts can adjust internal pressure to simulate the sensation of gravity while they sleep, a direct response to Feustel's account of ISS crew members who improvised by wedging themselves into cupboards because unanchored sleep in microgravity left them restless. "A lot of astronauts like to have pressure applied to their bodies when they sleep," CEO Max Haot has said. "We've heard that some of them wedge themselves in cupboards on the ISS."

Vast also hired a former Campbell's food developer to rethink astronaut cuisine for Haven-1, moving deliberately away from the freeze-dried fare that has defined orbital dining since the Apollo era. The company is leaning on Starlink connectivity, inherited through Vast's close working relationship with SpaceX, to give crew members gigabit-speed internet for communicating with family on Earth and for remotely operating the station's research lab when it is unoccupied. That last detail matters more than it sounds: Haven-1 will host crews of four for stays of up to ten days at a time, across a planned total of roughly 160 astronaut-days over its three-year operational life. For the overwhelming majority of its time in orbit, the most aesthetically considered space station ever built will simply be empty, run by remote command from Vast's mission control in Long Beach.

The Airbnb, the Hilton, and the WeWork of Orbit

The real estate framing that makes this story more than a design curiosity did not come from Vast's marketing department. It emerged organically in trade press coverage of the race to replace the International Space Station, which NASA will deorbit in 2030 at a cost of roughly 843 million dollars to tow it into the Pacific Ocean. Three companies are competing to fill the vacuum, and at least one market analysis has assigned each a distinct hospitality-sector identity, risk profile included.

Vast, with Haven-1 targeting a May 2026 launch, is cast as the agile, available option: the Airbnb of orbit, ready before its rivals and willing to operate at a fraction of the scale. Starlab, a joint venture between Voyager Space and Airbus that plans to inflate a 340-cubic-meter station from a single Starship launch around 2029, reads as the Hilton: institutionally backed, slower to market, built for steady government contracts rather than first-mover speed. Starlab closed a major credit facility in December 2025 to fund its final development phase, a signal of the kind of conservative capital structure that hospitality chains, not boutique operators, typically attract. Orbital Reef, Blue Origin's joint venture with Sierra Space, is the riskiest comparison: pitched as a mixed-use business park 250 miles above Earth, complete with promises of tourism, research labs, and even movie studios, but increasingly described by analysts as the WeWork of the group, a maximalist vision that may be too capital-intensive to survive the realities of launch physics. Blue Origin has shifted significant attention to its lunar lander program, and Orbital Reef remains dependent on the New Glenn rocket, which only recently began flying.

Max Haot, Vast's CEO, has pushed back hard against the hospitality framing his own product seems built to invite. "The purpose is not to build a luxury hotel in space and attract tourists," Haot told BBC Science Focus. "The purpose is to build a great environment to be and work in." It is a distinction that matters enormously to Vast's actual customers, who are not vacationing billionaires but pharmaceutical companies chasing protein crystallization in microgravity and fiber optic manufacturers pursuing clearer ZBLAN glass, plus a growing roster of sovereign nations paying fifty to a hundred million dollars to send a citizen-astronaut to orbit for two weeks. Whether the market chooses to read Haven-1 as workspace or as the first five-star address off the planet may not be Haot's decision to make. Once an aesthetic gets coded as luxury, in real estate or anywhere else, the coding tends to stick regardless of what the developer intended.

A Crypto Fortune Bankrolling a Design Bet

Behind Russell-Clarke's earth tones and maple veneer sits a financing structure unlike anything else in the commercial space race. Vast was founded in 2021 by Jed McCaleb, a serial technology entrepreneur who built his fortune founding the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, co-founding Ripple, and then founding Stellar after a falling-out with his Ripple co-founders. McCaleb's net worth, derived substantially from selling his early XRP holdings between 2014 and 2022, sits at roughly 3.9 billion dollars as of 2026, and he has committed up to a billion dollars of personal capital to Vast, a degree of self-funding that gives the company a structural advantage its NASA-dependent competitors lack. "There's not that many folks that are willing to dedicate the amount of resources and time and risk tolerance that I am," McCaleb has said.

That self-funding has not stayed purely personal. In March 2026, Vast closed a 500 million dollar round combining equity and debt, with investors including the Qatar Investment Authority, Mitsui, MUFG, Nikon, and Balerion Space Ventures, alongside McCaleb himself. The round signals that institutional capital, not just a crypto billionaire's risk appetite, now believes in the design-forward, fast-iteration approach that brought a former Apple designer onto an aerospace payroll in the first place. Vast has grown from fewer than two hundred employees in late 2023 to roughly eight hundred today, and nearly all of its hardware, including the welded aluminum primary structure of Haven-1 itself, is built in-house at its Long Beach headquarters, the first space station primary structure manufactured in the United States in over two decades.

The Stakes of Getting There First

Haven-1's primary structure passed pressure and load acceptance testing in Mojave earlier this year, after an initial 2025 launch target slipped to May 2026 once Vast's qualification testing revealed how much additional work the flight article would require. The station, weighing around 14,000 kilograms, will be the largest spacecraft ever to fly atop a Falcon 9. A four-person crew is expected to follow on a SpaceX Dragon capsule as soon as late June 2026, assuming the May launch holds.

The timing is not incidental. NASA is expected to select its Commercial LEO Destinations Phase 2 partners around mid-2026, the contract that will determine which private companies get government backing to build the ISS's actual successor. Vast does not currently hold a funded agreement with NASA, only an unfunded Space Act Agreement that gives the agency visibility into its progress, which makes a successful, fully crewed Haven-1 mission less a victory lap than a sales pitch: tangible proof, before the contract decision lands, that a company willing to put a former Apple designer in charge of crew comfort can also weld a pressure vessel that holds. If Haven-1 reaches orbit and a crew climbs aboard its maple-paneled common area on schedule, Vast will have done something none of its better-funded, more conventionally aerospace rivals have managed: turned a design philosophy built for the iPhone into the first inhabited address of the post-ISS era, sold not as a hotel and not quite as an office, but as proof that orbit is now zoned for a real estate market with floors, finishes, and tenants who pay by the day.