Max Space Sets Up Shop in Exploration Park
January 5, 2026 – Max Space is establishing a manufacturing facility at Exploration Park in Merritt Island at Kennedy Space Center, with the company planning to hire 30 to 50 people in 2026. A demonstration mission is set for 2027 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The company then plans to launch a full-sized Thunderbird Station which can accommodate up to eight astronauts.
Thunderbird Station, is a space station for Earth orbit, Moon and Mars, designed around a large expandable habitat that offers more usable volume per launch than any traditional metallic module.
Image Credit: Max Space
The company also confirmed that Mission Evolution, its first in-orbit expandable habitat demonstration, is manifested on a SpaceX rideshare launch in Q1 2027. Thunderbird Station: Large Volume, Radical Economy, for LEO, Moon and Mars Thunderbird Station is built to support 4 or more crew members continuously, with an incredible 350m³ of pressurized volume, more than triple that of a standard ISS module.
Launched on a single standard Falcon 9 rocket, the full expandable habitat launches compactly and expands 20x once deployed in orbit, requiring no in-orbit assembly. The interior features a novel reconfigurable architecture, morphic interior structure, that allows astronauts to dynamically adapt the space for research, manufacturing, or living during a mission.
The design was developed in collaboration with veteran astronauts to take full advantage of three-dimensional volume in microgravity, not just traditional floor and wall space, to create the most spacious and functional habitable volume ever built.
Thunderbird Station is initially configured with over 60 payload lockers with room in the station for several times that in additional racks for government and commercial missions, including, industrial scale in-space manufacturing. It is designed with 3x NASA’s required safety factors for traditional metallic structures, while streamlining operations and significantly cutting costs across government, defense, and commercial missions. It scales for future stations and surface habitats on the Moon and Mars.
“Thunderbird Station is not an incremental step, it’s a fundamental redesign of what LEO, Moon and Mars space stations can be,” said Saleem Miyan, CEO and Co-Founder of Max Space. “We’re pioneering building space real estate that reflects how we’ll live and work in space this decade and beyond.”
Thunderbird Station has not been designed to only support the needs for a continued presence in LEO, but it is specifically scalable for Moon and Mars habitats, while supporting U.S. dominance in space and growth of the space economy. The ISS is approaching end of life and most alternative commercial station concepts are built around expensive rigid modules with constrained interiors.
Max Space’s approach unlocks transformational capabilities: Exceptional volume flown on one standard launch, providing more capacity for crew, increased payload optionality, and supporting both civil and private missions. Further, Max Space stations are faster and simpler to produce than traditional metallics, reducing schedule risk for seamless mission continuation; significantly reduce cost to launch with no in orbit assembly required; and have been developed by astronauts for astronaut wellbeing and operational improvements for successful long-duration missions.
Source: Max Space Press Release
