Russia wants to resume joint space flights with the United States outside

The president said, according to the Interfax news agency, that a new agreement is being prepared for flights to the International Space Station in 2024 and 2025. Moscow had previously announced that it would end its cooperation with the United States in the field of space.

The International Space Station is one of the few places where the two countries have continued to work together since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

For example, US astronaut Loral O’Hara’s mission began on Friday aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that also carried Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub. The spacecraft docked with the International Space Station on Friday evening.

There they will join the current crew, which consists of NASA astronauts Yasmine Moghbili and Frank Rubio, Russian astronauts Dmitry Petlin, Konstantin Borisov and Sergei Prokopyev, Danish Andreas Mogensen and Japanese Satoshi Furukawa.

Due to the very tense relationship between the two countries, Russia recently announced that it would stop cooperation after 2024 and build its own space station. But because building the space station takes years, Moscow later announced that it was considering staying on board the ISS until 2028.

Russia’s space program suffered a major blow last month when the Luna-25 spacecraft crashed while attempting to land on the moon. This was the first Russian mission to the moon in 47 years.