Sawt Falasteen - French astronaut to fly to commercial space station under deal

"This confirms France's space ambitions," President Emmanuel Macron said on X late Monday after announcing the deal on the sidelines of a Paris conference.

Under the deal, Thomas Pesquet and Arnaud Prost will embark on separate missions that will last around two weeks each, the California-based Vast said in a statement.

Prost's first trip to space is planned to be to the Haven-1 commercial space station, which Vast has been developing.

After years of delays, the company insists the station is scheduled to finally be deployed next year.

Prost would serve as test engineer on the first crewed mission to the station.

"This astronaut mission to a private space station is a world-first," France's space agency CNES said.

- Aiming for Moon -

The other astronaut Pesquet will launch on a private Vast mission to the International Space Station, which will mark his third stay on the orbital laboratory.

Pesquet will be the commander of the mission, which is not scheduled to launch before mid-2027.

The 48-year-old told AFP on Tuesday that he welcomed the opportunity to return to space.

However, "for me, the long-term goal is the Artemis mission to the Moon", he added.

The European Space Agency announced last year that three European astronauts -- German, Italian and French -- would participate in NASA's Artemis mission aiming to return to the Moon by 2030.

Pesquest said he believed "the very first opportunity for the Moon will be in 2029".

"So having a mission in mid-2027 has absolutely no impact" on his lunar hopes, he added.

Both newly announced Vast missions will launch on the Falcon 9 rockets of billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX.

However the ISS mission will need to be approved by a panel of the space station's partners, which include NASA, the European Space Agency, Russia's Roscosmos, Japan's JAXA and the Canadian Space Agency.

If the mission is approved, it would be "a major first: no non-American has ever commanded a US capsule," the CNES said.

Vast was founded in 2021 by cryptocurrency billionaire Jed McCaleb with the aim of launching the first commercial space station with Haven-1.

The company aspires to eventually replace the ISS with Haven-2, a larger version of the first model.

After being continuously inhabited for more than a quarter of a century, the ISS mission is scheduled to end in 2030.

E.AbuRizq--SF-PST