Reluctant Russia Promises to Keep Working on ISS Until 2028
upstart writes:
Russia had previously threatened to leave the ISS by 2024:
Russia had previously threatened to leave the ISS by 2024, but is now the last of NASA's partners to agree to stay aboard the station for a few more years.
Russia has agreed to keep its cosmonauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) until 2028 despite earlier threats to withdraw from the orbiting lab.
NASA announced that its Russian counterpart "has confirmed it will support continued station operations through 2028," the space agency wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Russia was the last to sign on to extended operations on the ISS, with Japan, Canada, and the participating countries of the European Space Agency (ESA) having already agreed to support space station operations until 2030, when the ISS is due to retire.
In light of geopolitical tensions between Russia and its Western counterparts, Russia had previously threatened to pull out of the ISS in a series of vague statements. The Russian space agency then downplayed its threats, stating that it was planning on leaving the ISS after 2024.
"We will fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made." Yury Borisov, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in July 2022. "I think that by this time we will begin to assemble the Russian orbital station." At that time, it still wasn't clear whether that meant Russia was planning on staying beyond 2024, or if that was the hard cutoff.
Russia is planning on building its own space station in low Earth orbit. The Russian Orbital Space Station, nicknamed 'ROSS,' would launch in two phases. The first phase, which Russia hopes to launch in 2025, would include four modules, while the second phase would add two more modules and a service platform.
NASA and Roscosmos have had a longstanding partnership aboard the ISS for more than two decades. There has been at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos cosmonaut on board the space station at all times since the ISS launched in 1998.
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