Cape Canaveral. NASA astronauts will board Russian rockets again under a deal announced Friday, and Russian cosmonauts will travel to the International Space Station on SpaceX beginning in the fall.
The deal ensures that the space station always has at least one American and one Russian aboard so both sides of the orbital outpost can function smoothly, according to NASA and Russian officials. The swap had been in the works for a long time and was finalized despite Moscow’s war tensions in Ukraine, a sign that space cooperation between Russia and the United States continues.
US astronaut Frank Rubio will launch to the space station from Kazakhstan with two Russians in September. That same month, Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina will fly with two Americans and a Japanese aboard a SpaceX rocket from Florida. Another crew swap will occur next spring.
NASA explained that the agreement does not include any type of money exchange.
NASA astronauts routinely flew on Russian Soyuz rockets — for tens of millions of dollars each — until SpaceX began sending station personnel from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in 2020.
Russian cosmonauts traveled to the space station on NASA shuttles in the early 2000s. Before that, during the 1990s, astronauts and cosmonauts took turns flying each other’s spacecraft to and from the space station. from the Russian Mir station.
The news came on Friday, just hours after President Vladimir Putin ordered the replacement of Russian space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin, though the move appears to have no connection to the crew swap.
NASA explained that the agreement “will ensure continued safe operations” of the space station and protect those who live on board. Right now there are seven people there: three Americans and an Italian who flew with SpaceX and three Russians who arrived on a Soyuz.
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