Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) – Russian space officials have told their U.S. counterparts that Moscow expects to remain part of the International Space Station at least until its own orbiting outpost is built in 2028, a senior NASA official told Reuters on Wednesday. Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed director general of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, surprised NASA on Tuesday by announcing that Moscow intended to end the long-standing space station partnership “after 2024.” read more Kathy Lueders, NASA’s head of space operations, said in an interview that Russian officials later on Tuesday told the US space agency that Roscosmos would remain in the partnership as Russia works to launch its planned orbital outpost, called ROSS. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register “We’re not getting any indication at any working level that anything has changed,” Lunders told Reuters, adding that NASA’s relationship with Roscosmos remains “business as usual.” The space station, a science laboratory spanning the size of a football field and orbiting about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, has been continuously occupied for more than two decades as part of a US-Russia partnership that also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries. It offers one of the last areas of cooperation between the United States and Russia, although its fate has been in doubt since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. A formal agreement to extend Russia’s participation beyond 2024 has not yet been made. NASA, Russia and the station’s other partners plan to discuss the prospect of extending each other’s presence at the lab through 2030 during a periodic meeting Friday of the board that oversees the station’s management, Lueders said. Roscosmos published on its website on Wednesday an interview with Vladimir Solovyov, the flight director for the Russian part of the space station, who reportedly said that Russia should remain on the station until ROSS is operational. “We must, of course, continue to operate the ISS until we create a more or less tangible backlog for ROSS,” Solovyov said. “We have to take into account that if we stop manned flights for several years, then it will be very difficult to restore what has been achieved.” The American and Russian parts of the space station were purposely built to be interconnected and technically interdependent. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Joey Roulette. edited by Jonathan Oatis and Will Dunham Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
