“The exchange of flights adds a bit of credibility to our program,” said an official at Russia’s Roskosmos space agency.
The space authorities of Russia and the United States have agreed to an additional flight of the Russian Soyuz MS spacecraft that will carry an American astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS), the Interfax news agency reported today, in a rare sign of bilateral cooperation in a period of particularly tense relations between the two countries, due to the war in Ukraine.
The mission is part of an agreement between the Russian space agency Roskosmos and the United States’ NASA for cross-missions to the ISS.
“One of the Americans has actually stayed (on the ISS) for two missions. We added another flight to compensate for the time spent on the station,” Sergei Krikalev, executive director of the state-owned company for manned programs, told Interfax.
“This is a mutually beneficial business, we interact with each other and look for the best option. In principle, a good story – the exchange of flights – adds a little credibility to our program,” he said.
Russia’s space program suffered a major blow this week when the unmanned Luna-25 spacecraft crashed while trying to land on the moon’s south pole, three days before India’s Chandrayaan-3 successfully did so.
Joint program on the ISS
Washington and Moscow maintain their cooperation in space even though relations have reached their lowest level in decades due to the war in Ukraine, with astronauts staying together on the International Space Station, and commuting to and from it together.
Based on an agreement signed last year as part of the International Space Station program, for cross-flights, three Russian cosmonauts were to fly on the American Crew Dragon spacecraft and three American astronauts on the Russian Soyuz MS spacecraft in the period 2022-2024.
Russia has announced that it will leave the ISS and install its own space station at some point in the future, although plans for how and when this will be done are still under discussion.
The ISS, a science laboratory the size of a football field orbiting about 400 kilometers from Earth, has been manned continuously for more than two decades under a US-Russia-led partnership in which Canada, Japan and 11 European countries also participate.
Source :Skai
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