Havent played the game yet but was reading the rules and couldnt find a good anwser so here goes:

• Do you need to pay a command token to use component actions?
• Can they be used multiple times? I am not talking about action cards offcourse, as i understand they are for one time use. I was more talking about race abilities or upgrades.

No tokens needed.

Unless stated otherwise, you can use racial, tech, and other permanent component actions multiple times in a round, yes. However, I don't believe there are any such component actions that don't require you to either (A) exhaust the card, which means in effect you can only do it once, or (B) pay some sort of cost (like a strategy token or trade goods), which indirectly limits how many times you can do it.

Thank you both for the reply. so to summarise, no tokens needed to activate the component action, you can do it multiple times but probably not going to, because the cost is too high