Discovery Magazine reports that in a landmark decision Russia has announced initial plans to build a new orbital space station together with NASA to replace the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to operate until 2024.
Igor Komarov, the head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency, made the announcement flanked by NASA administrator Charles Bolden at Russia's Baikonur launchpad in Kazakhstan. "Roscosmos together with NASA will work on the programme of a future orbital station," said Komarov. "We agreed that the group of countries taking part in the ISS project will work on the future project of a new orbital station." Russia had said earlier this year it planned to create its own space station after 2024 using its modules from the ISS after it is mothballed. The two agencies will be unifying their standards and systems of manned space programs, according to Komarov. “This is very important to future missions and stations.”
The next goal for the two agencies is a joint mission to Mars said NASA chief Charles Bolden. “Our area of cooperation will be Mars. We are discussing how best to use the resources, the finance, we are setting time frames and distributing efforts in order to avoid duplication.”
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Monday March 30 2015, @10:21AM
Roskosmos' plans to re-use the russian modules for another space station are not new. Neither is the idea to seek collaboration with other space agencies like NASA or ESA. The code-name for the project is OPSEK [wikipedia.org], the Russian abbr. for "Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex".
More information can be found here [russianspaceweb.com] (2009)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @05:09PM
> OPSEK
From the headline I thought it was going to be a russification of opsec - that they were going to use the joint program to conduct a little industrial espionage on the american space program...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday March 31 2015, @01:36AM
You're thinking of SAEDA : )
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