NASA and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos have agreed to integrate flights to the International Space Station, allowing Russian cosmonauts to travel on American spacecraft in exchange for US astronauts being able to go on Russia’s Soyuz.
Roscosmos stated that the agreement ‘is in the interests of Russia and the United States and will foster the expansion of collaboration within the scope of the ISS programme,’ emphasising that it will assist the ‘exploration of outer space for peaceful reasons.’
NASA and Roscosmos have long wanted to relaunch routine integrated crewed flights as part of their cooperative partnership.
In the first integrated flights under the new arrangement, cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin will travel to space alongside US astronaut Frank Rubio from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which is leased by Moscow.
Anna Kikina will launch with two US astronauts and a Japanese astronaut on a SpaceX Crew Dragon voyage to the orbiting laboratory from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The European Space Agency cut ties with Russia earlier this week on a plan to land a rover on Mars as tensions over the conflict in Ukraine rise.
‘The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from each space agency to function. No one agency has the capability to function independent of the others,’ NASA said.
Former deputy prime minister and deputy defence minister Yuri Borisov just took Dmitry Rogozin’s place as Roscosmos’ director.
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