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International Space Station (ISS): Cosmonauts and astronauts fly together
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According to information from Moscow, Russia and the United States have extended the agreement on crossover flights to the International Space Station ISS. It has been agreed with the US space agency Nasa that mixed space teams will fly to the orbital station up to and including 2025, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced on Thursday, according to the Interfax news agency.
The ISS is one of the few things on which Americans and Russians are still working together after the outbreak of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine at the end of February 2022. Cosmonauts and astronauts also fly to the space station together. In the meantime, Russia had announced that it would stop cooperation after 2024 and build its own space station due to the tensions. However, since the construction of the station is taking time, Moscow later announced that it was considering staying on board the ISS until 2028.
Unplanned record in the cosmos
Most recently, US astronaut Loral O'Hara launched to the ISS with cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Niolai Chub on board a Russian Soyuz capsule in September. O'Hara will stay in space for about six months, Kononenko and Chub about a year. During the expedition, the crew of the ISS will disembark into the cosmos several times, and four cargo flights will also reach the ISS during this period. In addition, numerous scientific experiments are planned.
Also in September 2023, U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio and the two Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin returned to Earth together from the ISS after more than a year in space. With 371 days in space, it was the longest, but not planned, mission on the ISS, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced at the time. The crew was supposed to return in the spring. However, damage to the Soyuz MS-22 had ruined the plans.
jme/dpa