The Next Frontier

A former Nasa veteran astronaut, Andrew Feustel now advises private company Vast as it looks to build the world’s first commercial space station. As IWC celebrates its partnership with Vast, Feustel sat down with PRESTIGE to share what it feels like to literally work in a vacuum, his mission at Vast, and the significance of time in space.

- Words: LYNETTE KOH

If you're not smiling in space, you're doing stuff wrong,” says Andrew Feustel, who was present at the IWC booth at this year’s Watches & Wonders horology fair in Geneva.

The American/Canadian geophysicist and former Nasa astronaut knows all about making the most of life in microgravity.

As part of his illustrious 23-year tenure at Nasa, Feustel has completed three space missions, performed nine spacewalks, spent 226 days in space, and served as the commander of the International Space Station (ISS). He now serves as the lead astronaut at Vast, a company developing next-generation space stations. Vast’s Haven-1 is scheduled to be the world’s first commercial space station by next year.

Seated within the IWC booth, which was designed to look like a space station in a nod to its new partnership with Vast, Feustel shares how his three space missions varied greatly. In his first mission in 2009, he was part of the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. “I spent five days doing spacewalks on the Hubble spacecraft and replacing its components,” he recounts.

His second mission saw him fly on the space shuttle Endeavour to complete the assembly of the ISS. And for his third space mission in 2018, he launched together with Russian astronauts to the ISS, where they lived for six and a half months. He served as the commander of the ISS for most of that time.

Most of us will never know what it’s like to be blasted into orbit. Exiting the controlled conditions of a spacecraft to embark on a spacewalk, where an astronaut is subject to the vacuum and extreme conditions of space, is an even rarer experience. “It's a bit scary the first time. The only thing you see between your feet is the planet down below. You feel like you're going to fall to Earth, 400km below you,” says Feustel, smiling. “It can be overwhelming, but it’s fun.”

SPACE-BASED SOLUTIONS