The International Space Station (ISS) photographed by members of the Expedition 56 crew from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking, October 4, 2018. NASA/Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
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WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) – Russian space officials have informed their U.S. counterparts that Moscow would like to keep flying its cosmonauts to the International Space Station at least until its own orbital site is built, it said on Wednesday to Reuters a senior NASA official.
Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed director general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, surprised NASA on Tuesday by announcing that Moscow intended to end the long-standing space station partnership “after 2024”. Read more
Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of space operations, said in an interview that Russian officials told the U.S. space agency later Tuesday that Roscosmos would like to remain in the partnership while Russia works to launch the its planned orbital location, called ROSS.
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“We’re not getting any indication at any working level that anything has changed,” Lueders told Reuters, adding that NASA’s relationship with Roscosmos remains “business as usual.”
The space station, a science laboratory spanning the size of a football field and orbiting about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, has been continuously occupied for more than two decades under a US-Russia-led partnership that also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
It offers one of the last holdouts of cooperation between the United States and Russia, although its fate has been in doubt since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
No formal agreement has yet been reached to extend Russia’s participation beyond 2024. NASA, Russia and the station’s other partners plan to discuss extending each other’s presence at the lab through 2030 during a regular meeting Friday of the board that oversees the station’s management, Lueders said.
Roscosmos published on its website on Wednesday an interview with Vladimir Solovyov, the flight director of the Russian segment of the space station, who said that Russia must remain on the station until ROSS is operational.
“Of course, we have to continue operating the ISS until we create a more or less tangible delay for ROSS,” Solovyov said. “We have to bear in mind that if we stop manned flights for several years, it will be very difficult to recover what has been achieved.”
The US and Russian segments of the space station were deliberately built to be intertwined and technically interdependent.
(This story corrects the headline to read “remove less imminent than previously indicated,” not “stay with the space station until at least 2028; correct the first sentence to read “at least until the own is built outpost in orbit”, not “at least until its own The outpost in orbit was built in 2028”)
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Reporting by Joey Roulette; edited by Jonathan Oatis and Will Dunham
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