Two seats on two separate launches of Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft have been reserved for NASA astronauts, with the primary slated to take off from Russia’s Cosmodrome launch website in Kazakhstan this September. And Russian cosmonauts will be a part of at the least two future SpaceX mission to the International Space Station, marking the primary time a Russian has boarded one of SpaceX’s comparatively new Crew Dragon spacecraft.
NASA assigned astronaut Frank Rubio to the Soyuz mission in September, and astronaut Loral O’Hara will be a part of a later Soyuz flight. Roscosmos is placing cosmonaut Anna Kikina on SpaceX’s September flight, and Andrei Fedyaev will fly on one other SpaceX mission within the spring of 2023, in accordance with NASA.
NASA and Roscosmos each confirmed the agreement Friday.
The seat-swap agreement, which doesn’t contain any alternate of cost between the international locations, has been looming over NASA and Roscosmos for months amid rising tensions between the United States and Russia over the warfare in Ukraine.
NASA stated in an announcement Friday that inking a journey share agreement with Russia was essential to make sure “continued safe operations” of the ISS. If both the Russian Soyuz spacecraft or the SpaceX Crew Dragon car had been to run into points and be taken out of service, a seat-swap agreement would be certain that each US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts would nonetheless have entry to the area station.
“The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from each space agency to function. No one agency has the capability to function independent of the others,” NASA’s assertion reads.
Such journey sharing agreements have been frequent all through the two-decade historical past of the ISS. After NASA retired the Space Shuttle program in 2011, for instance, American astronauts needed to rely solely on seats aboard Soyuz spacecraft for entry to the ISS. That reliance ended solely after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon entered service in 2020.