Lisbon (AFP) — With NASA’s International Space Station set to come out of service in 2030, American aerospace firm Vast has stepped into a frenzied race for the world’s first commercial space station.

Haven-1 — a mini station scheduled for launch in May 2026 — has been designed for comfort, according to Andrew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut now an advisor at Vast.

“It has a three-year lifespan, and over that period of time, we plan to visit the spacecraft with multiple crews of four, four at a time,” he told AFP on the sidelines of the Web Summit in Lisbon.

The California-based firm, founded in 2021 by billionaire Jed McCaleb, aspires to replace the International Space Station with Haven-2, a larger version of the first model.

But Vast faces fierce competition from other contenders,

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