The International Space Station is one of the few projects on which the United States and Russia still work together. Both sides have now signed an agreement to continue joint flights to the ISS until 2025.
Russia and the USA have agreed to extend their agreement for joint flights to the International Space Station (ISS). In July and December, both sides signed two additional agreements to continue cross-flights until 2025, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.
The aim is to maintain the reliability of the ISS’s operation, Roskosmos further explained. This also ensures that at least one NASA astronaut and one Russian cosmonaut are on the station.
In so-called cross-flights, a US astronaut flies to the ISS as part of the crew of a Russian spacecraft and vice versa. In September, two Russian cosmonauts and a US astronaut flew to the ISS on board a Russian Soyuz capsule from the Kazakh cosmodrome at Baikonur.
Russia withdraws from ISS
The ISS, which has been orbiting the Earth since 1998, is one of the few areas in which Russia and the USA are still cooperating even after the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine began in February 2022. Their operation was originally planned until 2024, but the US space agency NASA does not want to decommission them until 2030. However, Roskosmos had already announced in July 2022 that it would withdraw from the project after 2024. Instead, Moscow is planning its own space station.
President Vladimir Putin announced in October that the first module for the Russian space station would be launched into space in 2027. At the same time, he said that he wanted to stick to the previous space goals despite the recent setbacks; including, above all, the Russian lunar program.