Washington-based startup Gravitics has signed a $125 million contract to expand Axiom Space’s planned space station, the latest deal in the growing private market for orbital habitats.

“Working with a station operator that will soon be putting equipment into orbit is exciting,” Gravitics CEO and founder Colin Dugan told CNBC. Axiom is one of the many companies that build private space stations while NASA provides that the international space station ends in orbit. Already, Axiom has modules from its space station under construction by the Italian aerospace entrepreneur Thales Alenia. The Gravitics order adds another “pressurized spacecraft” that would attach to Axiom’s station after its planned launch in two years.

The agreement between Axiom and Gravitics, which was founded in 2021, represents the startup’s most significant yet. Gravitics has already raised $20 million in venture capital in total to position itself as a private space station manufacturer.

Based in a northern suburb of Seattle and with about 50 employees, the company aims to offer space station modules (essentially the building blocks of an orbital habitat) as a line of plug-and-play products that can be launched on a variety of rockets, including those currently in use, sky-scrapers like SpaceX's Falcon 9, or future behemoths like Blue Origin's New Glenn. The space station modules designed by Gravitics will range in diameter from 3 meters (9 feet) to 8 meters (26 feet). The largest module, which the company says will have "the largest interior volume of any autonomous spacecraft," has been named StarMax, a name inspired by SpaceX's gigantic Starship rocket. "We started by looking at Starship and said, 'Someone is going to maximize the payload,'" Dugan said.

NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) program is currently awarding development contracts to companies building space stations in anticipation of the deliberate destruction of the ISS at the end of the decade. Axiomes have won the NASA contract for the first time in the construction of the construction work station, and Gravit connects the spaceship at the end of the last 10 years.

However, Dawan said that the gravity agreement was not exclusive. “We hope to participate in a few teams in [the second phase of the CLD] rather than as a [lead bidder] because we have no interest in operations... But I hope you will start to see some architectures reflect some [of our space station modules] will be integrated into some of these projects in the future,” Dugan said. Gravitics is working on developing prototypes, including testing key elements such as the prototype's thrust test and pressure test modules. Dugan said Gravitics plans to send some parts to the ISS for testing later this year and launch the small spacecraft by 2026. "We're a very deep-pocketed hardware company, so we're refining our designs and building them at the same time," Dugan says.

The company has signed an agreement with NASA on a new approach to testing large spacecraft, as well as its first contract to develop a Space Force. Dugan noted that the latest contract represents Gravitics working with a "customer that's ready to buy."

"The Space Force's budget is already bigger than NASA's, and that's not going to stop," Dugan said.

Dugan said the company plans to double its headcount and launch a new fundraising round in the coming months, and that the Axiom deal is a catalyst for Gravitics' growth.