“Without cooperation with the west, the Russian space program is impossible in all its parts, including the military one,” Dr. Luzin said.
Russia is also looking to cooperate more with China’s space program, which launched a laboratory module on Sunday to add to its space station, Tiangong. But Tiangong is not in an orbit that can be reached from Russia’s launchpads, and many of the discussions between the two countries have focused on cooperating on lunar exploration.
“The prospect of cooperating with China is a fiction,” Dr. Luzin said. “The Chinese have looked at Russia as a prospective partner up until 2012 and have stopped since then. Today, Russia cannot offer anything to China in terms of space.”
Not too long ago, it was the United States that wanted to end the International Space Station after 2024.
In 2018, the Trump administration proposed ending federal financing for the space station, hoping to move its astronauts to commercial stations. That initiative petered out a year later when NASA shifted its attention to accelerating plans to send astronauts back to the moon.
NASA is still trying to jump-start a market for future commercial space stations. In December, it awarded contracts worth a total of $415.6 million to three companies — Blue Origin of Kent, Wash.; Nanoracks of Houston; and Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Va. — to develop their designs.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/science/russia-space-station.html
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