WASHINGTON — Commercial space station and spacecraft developer Vast has established a new division intended to support work in national security space.
The company announced July 22 that it hired Melanie Stricklan to the new position of senior vice president of special programs. She is the co-founder and former chief executive of Slingshot Aerospace, a space domain awareness company, and previously served 21 years in the U.S. Air Force.
“Vast combines proven spaceflight expertise, advanced manufacturing and a mission-first mindset to support the United States’ most critical national security missions in low Earth orbit and beyond,” she said in a company statement.
Stricklan will lead a new special programs division at Vast. The company said that division “will deliver space-based capabilities for the U.S. national security enterprise, including the defense and intelligence communities.”
Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, said in the statement that Stricklan “is joining Vast at a pivotal moment as we develop in-house, high-performance technologies with direct applications for the U.S. defense and intelligence communities.”
The company didn’t elaborate on those technologies, but Vast announced in May plans to develop a line of high-power satellite buses. Haot said at the time that the bus was a natural extension of the company’s work on commercial space stations.
“We are going towards a world where low-cost but high-power satellites are really the future,” he said then, citing interest in national security applications among other uses of such spacecraft.
In-Q-Tel, a venture fund affiliated with the U.S. national security community, said last year that it had invested in Vast. Around the same time, Space Force Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, then serving as head of procurement for the service, visited Vast’s Long Beach, California, facilities as part of a tour of commercial space companies.
Haot said last fall that he could not discuss the Space Force’s interest in Vast’s work on commercial space stations, but noted that Space Force personnel do not work in space, with the exception of those serving as NASA astronauts.
He expected that to change. “It’s only a matter of time,” Haot said of the Space Force sending its service members to space. “Of course, in 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, they will be in space, so let’s do it quicker.”
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