Russia makes plans for its own space station and missions to the Moon

2 March 2015

Megan Toomey

Megan Toomey is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne.

The Russian Federal Space Agency, or Roscosmos, announced on last Tuesday that it will be building its own national space station in 2024 – and aims to send cosmonauts to the Moon by 2030.

Roscosmos intends to construct this new space station using modules from its segment that is currently connected to the International Space Station (ISS), which is only commissioned for operation until 2024.

Ru iss2 — A close-up view of the ISS in an image photographed by a crew member on space shuttle Discovery after the station and shuttle began another post-undocking relative separation, this time in March 2011.

NASA

The ISS is made up of two segments, the United States Orbital Segment (USOS) and the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS). The station is shared by about 15 countries, and five space agencies fund it – NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the European Space Agency (ESA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Roscosmos.

Roscosmos has been the only space agency able to send crew and cargo up to the ISS on its Soyuz rockets since 2011, when NASA retired its space shuttles.

The space agency aims to use the station as its cosmonauts’ base – and later, to actually send both orbiting missions around the moon and manned missions to the surface of the moon by 2030.

Roscosmos’ plans were discussed at a Scientific and Technical Council meeting under the chairmanship of Russian Space Agency’s Yuri Koptev, and they are hoping to develop a more detailed document of their plans at an upcoming meeting in March.

H/T The Guardian