The Astronaut Who Could Fly Before the ISS Was Ready For Him

John McFall lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident at nineteen. He learned to run again, became a professional sprinter, competed at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, became an NHS surgeon, and at thirty-seven was selected by the European Space Agency as part of its first concerted effort to put an astronaut with a physical disability into space. In February 2025, ESA certified him medically cleared for long-duration missions aboard the International Space Station. More than a year later, he still had no flight assignment. (UK Space Agency)

That changed Monday — but not the way most headlines will suggest.

The UK Space Agency announced an agreement with Vast, a US commercial space company, to explore sending McFall to Haven-1, the private station Vast plans to launch on a Falcon 9 in 2027. The deal is structured around corporate sponsors covering the full cost of the mission. McFall would spend up to thirty days aboard a station roughly the size of a studio apartment: forty-five cubic meters of habitable volume, four crew quarters, a domed window, and a propulsion system Vast says can rotate the station to produce artificial gravity — something the ISS never did. (Vast) (Wikipedia)

The disability milestone is real. McFall would become the first person with a physical disability to live and work in orbit. He would also be the first British astronaut to reach space since Tim Peake's Principia mission in 2015. The research agenda — prosthetics in microgravity, how the body balances without gravity, musculoskeletal adaptation — is genuinely novel science that could reshape how prosthetic devices are designed on Earth. (UK Space Agency)

But the more interesting story is the route.

In October 2023, the UK Space Agency signed an identical framework agreement with Axiom Space, a Houston company developing its own commercial station, to pursue a fully commercially sponsored British astronaut mission to the ISS. ESA's Neuenschwander noted at the time that the goal was to fly McFall "like everybody else" — meaning through a standard long-duration ISS assignment. The agreement was announced with some fanfare. Then, by most public measures, it went quiet. No flight assignment materialized. No sponsor was named. No timeline emerged. (SpaceNews)

The UK never publicly explained the stall. Axiom has continued working toward its own orbital platform, but its path to a UK astronaut on the ISS appears to have run into the same constraint that has complicated every ISS access request from non-traditional astronauts: the station's manifest is dominated by government agencies, commercial missions, and career astronauts with years of training pipelines. There is not a lot of room for a surgeon from Hampshire who happens to have a prosthetic leg.

Vast's pitch is different. Haven-1 is not the ISS. It is a single commercial module designed from the ground up to host private astronauts and government missions interchangeably, flying on SpaceX's Crew Dragon. Vast CEO Max Haot put it plainly in the company's announcement: commercial stations can "expand access to space, support greater crew inclusivity, and enable meaningful medical research that benefits humanity." That sentence is doing real work — it is saying explicitly that diverse crews are not just a policy goal but a product feature. (UK Space Agency)

That framing is new. NASA's astronaut corps, even as it has broadened its selection criteria, still selects from a pool of extreme qualifications and trains for years-long missions aboard a government station with fixed operational parameters. Vast is building stations that can accommodate a wider range of crew profiles because it is building for a market that does not yet fully exist. McFall's mission, if it flies, would be the first proof of concept for that market. (Vast)

The business model depends entirely on finding sponsors willing to pay for the full cost of a crewed orbital mission — a figure neither Vast nor the UK Space Agency would disclose. That is a meaningful gap. Sponsorship deals of this scale are rare in human spaceflight, and the history of commercial astronaut missions is short enough that the track record for full-cost-underwriting is essentially nonexistent. McFall's flight, if it happens, would establish whether "inclusion as sponsorship product" is a viable funding mechanism or whether it is a compelling story that a company is using to burnish its brand without yet having the revenue to back it up. (SpaceNews)

McFall himself has been measured about all of this. At the ESA briefing in February 2025, he said the reception from international partners had been "very warm and positive," but noted the process had required "detailed, methodical, exhaustive work" to get there. The Fly! feasibility study covered more than eighty topics across training, operations, medical, and crew support. Jerome Reineix, the study manager, said the main difficulty was not technical — it was about mindsets. "People have preconceptions of what a person with a physical disability can achieve, and you have to go again, explain again and demonstrate." (SpaceNews)

That part is not new to McFall. It is the same work he has been doing since he was nineteen.

The agreement signed Monday does not guarantee McFall flies. The UK Space Agency will now support Vast in meeting with potential sponsors. If the sponsorship comes together, the mission goes. If not, the MoU expires as a historical footnote and McFall continues waiting — this time for a station that does not exist yet and has never hosted a human.

Haven-1 is scheduled to launch in 2027. Whether McFall is aboard depends entirely on whether someone decides his fifteen minutes of microgravity research and the symbol of his presence are worth what it costs to put him there. The disability milestone is not in question. The commercial model is.