The "Vast" World of Marketing
Vast's Justin Hartney on filming the first commercial space station while it's still being built.
Hard tech has a marketing problem. Not a lack of talent, but a language barrier between those building the future and the world that needs to understand why it matters. The best marketers in this space aren't just translators, they're architects of belief.
Staying In Orbit exists to surface those voices. Each issue, we sit down with a marketing leader at a company defining what's next in space, science, and hard tech — and ask them how they think, what they've learned, and where the field is heading.
— Chandler, Founder & Chief Galactic Officer at Imagine Milk
Documenting the Frontier
This month we're hearing from Justin Hartney, who owns content and visual storytelling at Vast, the company building Haven-1, the first commercial space station. His days are spent documenting the vehicle as it comes together, capturing the hardware, the teams, and the milestones along the way. We sat down to hear his approach.
Justin Hartney, Senior Photographer & Videographer @ Vast
IM: As Vast builds Haven-1, the first commercial space station, what's the role of high-quality visuals in getting the public genuinely excited about it—versus just informed?
J: Vast is building the worlds first commercial space station and that means doing a lot of things that no one has ever done, and it’s a privilege to be in those rooms documenting the progress. The atmosphere and aesthetics of cinema inspire how we light and film our scenes. But what’s happening in front of the camera is real! it’s a mix of documenting as much hardware manufacturing, testing, and integration but with the goal of elevating the scene with a strong aesthetic.
IM: For marketers in aerospace who don't have dedicated visual production—what's the minimum viable content strategy to move the needle?
J: Capture incredible visuals of whatever’s happening in front of you. Humans and hardware are always a must for us. We’re a human space station company, show the two together whenever possible. Also humans for scale next to hardware always helps the public understand what they are looking at.
IM: What does your day to day look like?
J: Almost every step of the production process happens everyday with so many projects at once. Editing photos, popping into the clean room to film hardware being integrated into Haven-1, scouting another team’s workspace for another shoot. Interviewing a team lead for a project or asking out astronaut advisors on what kind of camera lenses we should send up to space. My favorite spot is always the clean room. That’s where every team’s progress leads up to. It’s surreal to be inside the vehicle capturing it being built.
Haven Demo
IM: What are you looking forward to at Vast?
J: Haven-1. Both when the finished vehicle leaves to go for testing at NASA and then integration to the rocket at Florida and then of course the launch itself. It was emotional seeing Haven Demo get integrated to the rocket and even more so on launch night seeing 4K video get downlinked from cameras I helped position. During these moments with Haven Demo, I knew how special they will be when it comes to Haven-1.
Haven-1
In The Imagine Milk Orbit 🚀
🚁 SkyFall is official. AV has teamed up with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to co-design and co-manufacture three Mars helicopters for the SkyFall mission, targeting a late 2028 launch. It builds directly on the AV and JPL partnership that produced Ingenuity, the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, and carries the same engineering discipline forward. We had the privilege of working with AV's MacCready Works on the film about that legacy.
Behind the scenes of MacCready Works “Ingenuity Helicopter” Shoot
🔦 We launched Valaris with Attalon, their flagship family of high-energy laser solutions. Valaris combines advanced laser architectures with American engineering and manufacturing excellence to deliver scalable, mission-ready capabilities for today’s most advanced directed energy systems. Checkout their new website and embedded interactive CAD designs here (see how did it below).
🗽 Beyond Reach Labs is now in NYC! Solar arrays are one of the quiet constraints on what a satellite can do: more power means more payload, better services, bigger missions. Beyond Reach Labs is working on that with Flarewing™, a deployable array that flat-packs withoutgaps, which is how theyget considerably more power out of the same launch volume. Nice to see hardware like that being built in New York.
📅 Next on the calendar: AFA. We'll be at the AFA Air, Space & Cyber Conference September 14-16, cameras in hand. If you need coverage at a show this fall, reach out and we'll get you on the schedule.
✨ Highlight: KeyCAD is opening its beta
Most teams have great CAD files and no fast way to show them to anyone. Renders take weeks. The hardware ships before the story does.
We hit that wall on enough Imagine Milk projects that we built the solution and spun it out into its own company: KeyCAD.
Drop in your CAD, get marketing-ready stills, turntables, and share links all with simple prompts while maintaining accurate geometry.
Beta is open and we're onboarding now!
👉 Reach out to Chandler to join the first group.
