Nasa And Russia Have Signed An Agreement To Share Astronauts After Months Of Discussion

NASA assigned astronaut Frank Rubio to the Soyuz mission in September, and astronaut Loral O’Hara will join a later Soyuz flight. Roscosmos is putting cosmonaut Anna Kikina on a SpaceX flight in September, and Andrei Fedyaev will fly on another SpaceX mission in the spring of 2023, according to NASA. NASA and Roscosmos confirmed the deal on Friday. The seat swap deal, which involves no exchange of payments between the countries, has been looming over NASA and Roscosmos for months amid rising tensions between the United States and Russia over the war in Ukraine. NASA has repeatedly said that tensions on the ground have not affected the countries’ ongoing cooperation in space, although the ISS — which is jointly managed by NASA, Roscosmos and several other space agencies — has been the subject of belligerent rhetoric imposed by Russian politicians. Dmitry Rogozin, who was replaced as head of Roscosmos on Friday, had threatened to completely withdraw Russian cooperation from the ISS. NASA said in a statement on Friday that the transport share agreement with Russia was vital to ensure the “continued safe operation” of the ISS. Should either the Russian Soyuz spacecraft or the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle experience problems and become disabled, a seat swap agreement would ensure that both American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts would still have access to the space station. “The station was designed to be interdependent and relies on contributions from each space agency to operate. No one agency can operate independently of the others,” NASA’s statement said. Such sharing agreements have been common throughout the ISS’s two-decade history. After NASA retired the Space Shuttle program in 2011, for example, American astronauts had to rely solely on seats on the Soyuz spacecraft to access the ISS. That dependency ended only after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon entered service in 2020. CNN’s Kristin Fisher and Karen Smith contributed