According to a deal announced on Friday, July 15, NASA astronauts will once again travel to space on Russian rockets, and Russian cosmonauts will ride SpaceX rockets to the International Space Station starting this fall.
US-Russia Agreement
According to NASA and Russian officials, the agreement guarantees that there will always be at least one American and one Russian on board the orbiting outpost to maintain both sides of the outpost operating well.
The trade, which had been in the works for a while and was finally completed despite concerns over Moscow's conflict with Ukraine, is a sign of ongoing Russia-U.S. relations in space collaboration.
Although the International Space Station (ISS), which is jointly run by NASA, Roscosmos, and several other space agencies, has become the target of Russian politicians, NASA has repeatedly stated that tensions on Earth have no impact on the nations' ongoing collaboration in space.
Dmitry Rogozin, who was ousted as Roscosmos' director on Friday, once said that he wanted to halt all Russian support for the ISS.
In September, two Russians and American astronaut Frank Rubio will fly from Kazakhstan towards the space station. On a SpaceX rocket departing from Florida in the same month, Anna Kikina, a Russian cosmonaut, will go alongside two Americans and one Japanese. Next spring, there will be another personnel swap.
The Astronauts and Cosmonauts
According to NASA, no money will be exchanged as part of the deal.
Up until SpaceX began transporting station crews from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in 2020, NASA astronauts frequently embarked on Russian Soyuz rockets for tens of millions of dollars each, as noted by Phys.
In September, NASA appointed astronaut Frank Rubio to the Soyuz mission, and Loral O'Hara will go on a subsequent Soyuz trip.
According to NASA, Andrei Fedyaev will ride on another SpaceX mission in the spring of 2023, and Roscosmos is sending cosmonaut Anna Kikina on SpaceX's September mission.
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Russia-NASA History
In the early 2000s, Russian cosmonauts traveled to the space station on NASA's shuttles. Before that, in the 1990s, astronauts and cosmonauts alternated trips to and from Russia's Mir space station on each other's spacecraft.
Before 2020, when SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule restored NASA's human spaceflight capacity and started regular ISS flights from Florida, the US relied on Russia's Soyuz to transport American astronauts to the space station after the shuttle's retirement in 2011.
Engineer Kikina will be the first Russian to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule; she is also the only female cosmonaut currently serving Russia. While the arrangement was being negotiated, she was preparing for the trip at NASA's astronaut center in Houston.
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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
