Russia may further maintain its ISS segment if U.S. provides financing - Roscosmos
KOROLYOV, Moscow region. April 23 (Interfax) - Russia stands ready to continue maintaining its segment on board the International Space Station (ISS), but only if the United States helps finance it, Roscosmos Executive Director for Advanced Projects and Science Alexander Bloshenko told reporters on Friday.
"We will be ready to maintain our segment on a paid-for basis if the American side is interested in that," Bloshenko said.
Roscosmos is not willing to waste resources on working on board the station, as the increasingly longer time required for its maintenance would hinder the research program, he said.
"Considering that the crew has been spending increasingly more time not on scientific experiments, for which the station actually exists, but on its maintenance and repairs, we won't be able to act as a maintenance team in this context," Bloshenko said.
It is possible that Russian cosmonauts might fly simultaneously to the ISS and a new space station for several years , he said.
Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin said earlier on Wednesday that, once Russia leaves the ISS, its partners will take over the responsibility for the Russian segment.
"We are beginning negotiations with our NASA partners, we are formalizing them now, and it does not mean that the station will be scrapped and dumped into the ocean immediately after 2025. We will simply hand over the responsibility for our segment to the partners. Or we will do the work necessary for operating the station on the commercial basis, rather than at the expense of the budget," Rogozin said.
Bloshenko said this will not cause damage to intellectual property aspects.
"We're not saying that we'll abandon it as a trophy or leave it as a gift. Our ISS partners and we perfectly know each other's equipment. Certainly, there'll be no intellectual damage in terms of know-how leak," he said.
Bloshenko had said earlier on Friday that Russia planned to start deploying the first phase of a new space station in 2025-2030 and the second phase in 2030-2035.
As was reported earlier, Russia plans to start building its own space station by launching its first module in 2025. This is likely to be a science and power module, which was originally designed to become part of the ISS.
Rogozin has said earlier that about 80% of the equipment used on the Russian segment of the ISS has exhausted its service life, and the costs of its maintenance after 2025 would be comparable to the costs of building a new station. Roscosmos stands ready to start building a new station already now and is expecting the relevant instructions from the government and the president, he said.
A new station should be not permanently inhabitable, like the ISS, but should be visited occasionally because of increased radiation danger. Russian Academy of Sciences President Alexander Sergeyev said robots and artificial intelligence should be used on the station.
Vladimir Solovyov, the chief of the Russian ISS segment mission, has said the new station would initially be composed of four modules and that their number would later be increased to six. The station's crew would be comprised of two to four people, and the volume of its pressurized compartments should be 667 cubic meters at the second stage. The station should have 48 external working positions. Crews would visit it once or twice a year, and up to three cargo spacecraft would be launched to it annually.
Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov said Russia would be able to finance the construction of a new space station on its own but also stands ready for cooperation. He said the station could serve as "some staging post for flights to Moon and the exploration of the Moon and cislunar space."
An informed source told Interfax on Thursday Russia is currently drafting plans to fund the construction of an independent space station in the period before 2030, which could cost up to $6 billion.