The space industry is on the verge of a revolution. Launch costs, which have fallen dramatically over the past five years, will continue to fall as heavy rockets like SpaceX’s Starship and Relativity’s Terran R become operational. In parallel with these developments, multiple private companies have introduced plans to build commercial space stations for science, manufacturing and even tourism.
If space stations are the next phase of orbiting business, they’ll need off-the-shelf parts — and Gravity wants to be the one who makes them. The startup is led by aerospace industry veteran Colin Doughan, who mapped these currents and saw a gap in the market. Doughan’s career includes a nearly 20-year tenure at Lockheed Martin, where he served as a senior finance manager handling large satellite constellations for government clients. He also co-founded Altius Space Machines, which was eventually purchased by Voyager Space in 2019.
Private station operators “need an easy LEGO brick to build in space,” he told businesskinda.com in a recent interview: Versatile, modular hardware to help humanity build in space at scale.
Gravitics, which emerged from stealth today after announcing a $20 million seed round, calls its building block “StarMax.” (Doughan also calls it an SUV — a “Space Utility Vehicle.”) The StarMax modules, in particular, are huge: The model listed on the company’s website is nearly 26 feet in diameter and has an internal usable volume of 400 cubic meters, almost half that of the International Space Station. Gravitics wants to position these modules as the essential basic unit for living and working in space.
The initiative has caught the attention of investors in a major way, as the seed round illustrates – further evidence that the space station and its habitat in space are getting hotter. Funding was led by Type One Ventures, with additional participation from Tim Draper of Draper Associates, FJ Labs, The Venture Collective, Helios Capital, Giant Step Capital of Chicago, Gaingels, Spectre, Manhattan West and Mana Ventures.
From an investor’s standpoint, Tarek Waked, founder of Type One and board member of Gravitics, said his company noticed several underlying trends that support the company’s vision for the future.
“We are betting that launch costs will go down. We are betting that Starship will revolutionize the industry,” he said. It’s not just Starship’s payload capacity that has the Gravitics team excited. It’s the potential for the rocket to send a lot more people into space – people who have nowhere to stay right now.
“There is no infrastructure for those people to go [to]and even if we were to build that infrastructure today, there’s no modular or cost-effective way to get that much infrastructure into orbit,” Waked said. “And that’s where I think Gravitics plays.”
StarMax to scale. Image Credits: Gravity
Supplying the stations of the future
The specific game that Gravitics makes is emphatically not as a space station operator. Blue Origin and Sierra Space’s Orbital Reef, Voyager and Lockheed’s Starlab, and a third project led by Northrop Grumman have already received major funding from NASA under the agency’s Commercial low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program. Rather than competing with these companies, Gravitics wants to be their core supplier.
Doughan said he expects abundant demand for the product in the second half of the decade as operators begin their first buildout. In addition, Gravitics aims to meet the ongoing needs of these stations once they are operational, plus meet the organic demand the company believes will arise as launching cargo and crew costs fall. StarMax will have power and propulsion on board for delivery and docking (and sure enough, the company has appointed Virgin Orbit’s former senior director of propulsion, Scott Macklin, as director of engineering).
“What we suspect is going to happen is demand for stations will grow,” Doughan said. “They’re going to need scalability over time.”
A view of an office at StarMax. Image Credits: Gravity
What the economy in low Earth orbit will ultimately look like is anyone’s guess though, and from the outside it seems that StarMax’s emphasis on scalability in the design (the module has docking ports at both ends) also protects against the infamous aerospace industry. uncertain timelines. But it also makes sense from a market perspective: Gravitics is willing to sell the StarMax module to entities that might want to use it as a free-flyer, or an operator that wants flexibility in offering short stays or long-term attachments to the stations; but StarMaxes can also be daisy-chained to form even larger platforms in space as more and more people spend time in space.
“of or pertaining to gravity”
Despite all the talk about Starship, the company isn’t putting all its eggs in that one, Musk-y basket. The range of StarMax modules under development is being designed to be compatible with other next-generation launch vehicles such as United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. While Gravitics is tight-lipped about how much a single StarMax might cost, Doughan said it would be competitive with a recent deal between Axiom Space and Thales Alenia for two station modules, a €110 million ($108 million) contract. ), or $54 million each.
The company recently opened a 42,000-square-foot facility just north of Seattle, where it has already begun building prototypes and preparing for early module pressure testing early next year. Gravitics is also in talks with Florida development groups about building a larger manufacturing and integration facility right next to their customer base at the Kennedy Space Center. In addition to these physical spaces, the company will also use the resources from this seed round to further grow its team. It has already attracted notable talent like the aforementioned Macklin and Bill Tandy, former mission architect and chief engineer for Orbital Reef.
The pressure testing in the first quarter of next year is the first step toward testing a StarMax in orbit, though Doughan declined to provide details on that timeline. But it’s safe to say the company is moving fast — as are all companies hoping to operate the next generation of space stations — in light of the approaching decommissioning of the ISS at the end of the decade. NASA officials have made it clear they don’t want a hole in the space station, and they’re willing to help fund ventures to ensure a strong U.S. presence in orbit. To keep up with this pace, Gravitics is now taking pre-orders for delivery in 2026.
You must have noticed the company name by now. Gravity – according to some online dictionaries, it is an archaic word meaning of or pertaining to gravityone that has largely been replaced by the word gravity. Doughan and Waked firmly believe that the company is laser-focused on meeting the needs of today’s customers with the Zero G StarMax modules. But Doughan admits that the real “north star” of the company, as he put it, is gravity solutions, with a lowercase “g”: space stations that mimic Earth’s gravity to allow for a truly long-term human presence in orbit.
“If we really want to make space our heritage and really extend human flourishing through the solar system, gravity solutions are really the only way that’s going to happen. Although that is not today, it remains the northern star for the company.”
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