Two seats have been reserved in two separate launches of Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft for NASA astronauts, and the first is scheduled to take off from the launch site of the Russian spaceport in Kazakhstan this September. And Russian cosmonauts will join at least two future SpaceX missions on the International Space Station, the first time a Russian has boarded one of SpaceX’s relatively new Crew Dragon spacecraft.
NASA assigned astronaut Frank Rubio to the Soyuz mission in September, and astronaut Loral O’Hara will join a later Soyuz flight. Roscosmos is putting cosmonaut Anna Kikina on the September flight of SpaceX, and Andrei Fedyaev will fly on another SpaceX mission in the spring of 2023, according to NASA.
NASA and Roscosmos confirmed the deal Friday.
The exchange of seats, which does not involve any exchange of payments between the countries, has been planned for months over NASA and Roscosmos amid growing tensions between the United States and Russia over the war in Ukraine.
NASA has repeatedly said that tensions on the ground have had no effect on countries’ continued cooperation in space, although the ISS, which is operated jointly by NASA, Roscosmos and several other space agencies, s ‘has become the subject of warlike rhetoric imposed by Russia. politicians. Dmitry Rogozin, who was replaced as head of Roscosmos on Friday, had threatened to completely withdraw Russian cooperation from the ISS.
NASA said in a statement Friday that signing a shared travel agreement with Russia was crucial to ensuring the ISS’s “continued safe operations.” If the Russian Soyuz spacecraft or the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle had problems and were out of service, a seat exchange agreement would ensure that both American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had access to the space station.
“The station was designed to be interdependent and is based on the contributions of each space agency to operate. No agency has the ability to operate independently of the others,” the NASA statement says.
These shared travel arrangements have been common throughout the two decades of ISS history. After NASA withdrew the space shuttle program in 2011, for example, American astronauts had to rely entirely on seats aboard the Soyuz spacecraft to access the ISS. This dependency ended only after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon went into service in 2020.
CNN’s Kristin Fisher and Karen Smith contributed