2023-10-27 08:28:50
Soyuz spacecraft will continue to be used for transport links to the ISS, but not for future flights to the Russian Orbital Station (ROS). About it stated chief designer of the station, deputy general designer of RSC Energia Vladimir Kozhevnikov in an interview with TASS.
“Soyuz spacecraft are not planned for use in ROS. “Soyuz MS continues to exist as a means of transport support for the ISS,” he said.
For flights to the ROS, a manned transport ship (PTS) must be developed by 2027, which will carry out flights from Vostochny. The modernized Progress-ROS cargo ship will also be used in transport communications. As the agency notes, it was previously assumed that at the first stage Soyuz and Progress aircraft would fly to the ROS, and at the second stage the Orel PTK would fly.
On October 27, the head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, announced the allocation of funding and the president’s instructions to approve the project for creating the ROS. He added that the service life of the ISS will end by 2030, so Russia needs to begin work on a project for its own station no later than 2024. Otherwise, “the ISS will no longer exist, and the Russian station will not exist yet,” explained the head of the state corporation.
Borisov previously said that Russia should withdraw from the ISS project at the moment when the deployment of ROS begins. In October, he clarified that the Russian Federation’s participation in the ISS project after 2028 will depend on the technical condition of the station. Roscosmos presented the model of the ROS in July 2022 at the Army-2022 forum. According to Interfax, the preliminary cost of building a new space station was estimated at 600 billion rubles.
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