Policy
Russian space chief meets NASA administrator in US
The last time that Roscosmos and NASA's chiefs conferred in person was in October 2018.
![In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Dmitry Bakanov, general director of the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on March 31. [Vyacheslav Prokoftev/Pool/AFP]](/gc8/images/2025/08/15/51330-bakanov-370_237.webp)
By AFP and BlueShift |
The general director of Russia's space agency Roscosmos last week met his NASA counterpart for talks in the United States.
Space has been one of the few areas of cooperation between Russia and the United States after Moscow's offensive on Ukraine brought relations between the two space pioneer nations to lows not seen since the Cold War.
Roscosmos' director, Dmitry Bakanov, and NASA's acting administrator, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy met July 31 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The meeting coincided with the attempted launch of a US-Japanese-Russian crew to the International Space Station (ISS). Weather delayed the launch to August 1.
Roscosmos announced after the meeting that it had reached an agreement with NASA to continue joint operations aboard the ISS through 2028.
"The dialogue went well. We agreed that we will operate the ISS until 2028... And we will work on the issue of de-orbiting it until 2030," Bakanov was quoted as saying by Russian state-owned news.
In a gesture of goodwill, Bakanov invited Duffy to visit Moscow and the Russia-leaser Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan for the November launch of a US-Russian crew to the ISS.
The last meeting of the two agencies' leaders took place in October 2018.
A busy agenda
The ISS, a flagship of multinational scientific cooperation, has been continuously occupied by cosmonauts and astronauts since November 2000.
It was set up by Russia, the United States, Europe and Japan and assembly was started in 1998.
Originally slated to be decommissioned by 2024, NASA planned to extend its operations until the 2030s before deorbiting.
With the recent agreement, Roscosmos now aligns with that extended timeline, offering more avenues for international cooperation in the meantime.
As part of the slew of sanctions imposed on Russia since its assault on Ukraine, many Western countries ceased partnerships with Roscosmos, but its Soyuz spacecraft remains one of the few capable of reaching the ISS.
Russia's space program, which for decades has been a source of great pride for the country, has suffered for years from a chronic lack of funding, corruption scandals and failures such as the Luna-25 probe in August 2023.
Luna-25 crashed into the Moon's surface during an attempted landing.