Russia to build its space station after 2030 - Roscosmos head Rogozin
MOSCOW. May 28 (Interfax) - A new Russian orbital space station will be built after 2030, Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin said.
"We're now starting to design a new orbital station. We already have two modules in reserve. One of them, a so-called node module, has already been created, and the second one is a power module, which will help supply power to our new station," Rogozin said during a live stream on the Soloviev LIVE YouTube channel.
"We plan to attach several modules to it: as a matter of fact, after 2030, the Russian Federation will be the country that will create a new [space] station," he said.
However, it will depend on global tendencies whether the new station is exclusively a Russian project or international, he said.
It will depend on "opponents and allies' attitude to us, but, on the whole, we're creating a technical platform in order to breathe life into it," he said.
Rogozin also explained the main differences of the new orbiting outpost from the International Space Station, where scientific experiments are conducted presently.
"It could be a visitable facility, a permanently inhabited one, but there will be one and main difference between our new national station and the ISS: it will become a platform for tackling a wide variety of tasks. For example, the ISS today is unable to fill spacecraft arriving at the International Space Station up with fuel, but this is needed," Rogozin said.
Russia needs an orbital filling station, which will make it possible to fill satellites up with fuel, thus increasing their service life in orbit, or supply fuel to spacecraft for more lengthy flights, he said.
"In other words, we're effectively creating a platform for exploring far-out space," he said.
The new station also could help control the state of Russia's group of satellites and could become a place to assemble spacecraft for missions to far-out space, he said.
"We're going to assemble spacecraft in orbit for flights to Mars, the Moon, to asteroids, because it's very difficult and challenging to lift such an entire construction up from the Earth. Americans have calculated that launching a super heavy-lift rocket costs approximately $2 billion. Of course, we'll do this at less cost, but it's also a lot of money," Rogozin said.
Besides, the new station could become a repair base for module spacecraft, which could approach the station during such work.
Rogozin said in mid-May that the Energia Rocket and Space Corporation would develop a concept of a new orbital station.