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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA astronauts will return to driving Russian rockets underneath an settlement introduced Friday, and Russian cosmonauts will catch lifts to the Worldwide House Station with SpaceX starting this fall.
The settlement ensures that the area station will all the time have not less than one American and Russian on board to maintain either side of the orbiting outpost working easily, in line with NASA and Russian officers. The swap had lengthy been within the works and was finalized regardless of tensions over Moscow’s battle in Ukraine, an indication of continuous Russia-U.S. cooperation in area.
U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio will launch to the area station from Kazakhstan with two Russians in September. That very same month, Russian cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, will be part of two People and one Japanese aboard a SpaceX rocket flying from Florida. One other crew swap will happen subsequent spring.
No cash will trade palms underneath the settlement, in line with NASA.
NASA astronauts routinely launched on Russian Soyuz rockets — for tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} apiece — till SpaceX began flying station crews from NASA’s Kennedy House Heart in 2020. Russian cosmonauts rode to the area station on NASA’s shuttles again within the early 2000s. Earlier than that, in the course of the Nineties, astronauts and cosmonauts took turns flying on one another’s spacecraft to and from Russia’s Mir station.
Friday’s information got here simply hours after the blustery chief of the Russian area company, Dmitry Rogozin, was changed by President Vladimir Putin, though the transfer didn’t seem to have any connection to the crew swap. Rogozin was anticipated to be given a brand new submit.
NASA mentioned the settlement will “guarantee continued secure operations” of the area station and shield these dwelling on board. Seven persons are up there proper now: three People and one Italian who flew up with SpaceX and three Russians who arrived in a Soyuz.
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The Related Press Well being and Science Division receives help from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Division of Science Training. The AP is solely liable for all content material.
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