(Washington) An official with Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said on Monday it “hopes” that Moscow will continue to participate in the International Space Station (ISS) after 2024, despite statements that raised concerns this summer about a possible rapid withdrawal of the space station. Russia after this date.
Posted yesterday at 10:56 p.m.
“We are beginning to discuss expanding our participation in the ISS program with our government and hope to get permission to continue this year,” Roscosmos director of human spaceflight Sergei Sergei told a press conference. Krikaliov.
“We’re starting to think about designing and building a new station, but we know that’s not going to happen very quickly,” he also said.
“So probably we will continue to fly until we have a new infrastructure that allows us to have a permanent human presence in low orbit at least”, added this former cosmonaut.
The international partners operating the ISS – American and Russian space agencies, but also European, Canadian and Japanese – are currently only committed until 2024.
NASA has already announced that it wants to continue operating the ISS until 2030.
Against the backdrop of strong Russian-Western tensions linked to the war in Ukraine, the boss of Roscomos, Yuri Borissov, announced this summer that Russia would leave the ISS “after 2024” and build its own orbital station.
But he had not set a specific date for the withdrawal.
The commissioning of a Russian space station will take many years, and without the ISS, Russia would then have no destination where to send its cosmonauts.
Mr. Krikaliov, the director of Russian manned flights, spoke in English on Monday at a press conference organized by NASA before the takeoff on Wednesday to the ISS of a SpaceX rocket, with on board a Russian cosmonaut, two American astronauts and one Japanese.
The space sector is one of the few areas of cooperation that has survived the extreme tensions between the United States and Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February.