[ad_1]
Russia and China have signed an agreement to build and work on an “International Scientific Lunar Station” orbiting the moon, the country’s space agencies said on Tuesday. Space powers had been in talks for months as Russia debated whether it would participate in NASA’s Gateway program, a rival lunar space station that will be built by a coalition of other nations over the next decade.
The International Lunar Science Station that Russia and China will work on is “a complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and / or orbit of the moon,” Roscosmos said in a statement. It will be designed to support a variety of research experiments “with the possibility of long-term unmanned operation with the prospect of a human presence on the moon,” the statement said.
Like NASA, China is courting international support for its own moon infrastructure projects. He also sent several robotic Chang’e missions to the moon, including the first landing on the other side of the moon and a quick sample retrieval mission in December.
The lunar space station deal, signed virtually between Chinese space chief Zhang Kejian and Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin, marks the latest development in Beijing’s efforts to explore the moon alongside rivals like NASA, which is banned from work with China under a law passed by Congress. in 2011.
Russia, which has maintained a decades-long partnership with NASA on the International Space Station, has been reluctant to extend its space alliance with the United States to the Moon.
NASA has stepped up efforts to return astronauts to the moon under the Trump administration through its Artemis program. Part of that push involved leading a multilateral pact called the Artemis Accords, an effort to set standards of behavior in space. Nine other countries have so far signed the Artemis Accords, but Russia is not one of them, after the United States sought to exclude Moscow from the first talks on the accords last year.
NASA has entered into agreements with the European Space Agency, Japan and Canada to work on its Lunar Gateway, the space station slated to orbit the Moon. NASA has asked Russia to help build this station, but Moscow decided that NASA’s request to Russia to provide an airlock for the Gateway was “unworkable,” a spokesperson for Roscosmos said in December. .
“NASA presented the Russian-American memorandum of understanding in Roscosmos regarding cooperation in the framework of the Gateway project. The MoU suggested that Roscosmos commit to providing an airlock module for the crew, ”the spokesperson said. “After studying the draft document, the participation of the Russian side in the volume suggested by the American partners was deemed impractical.”
Russia quickly turned its attention to China’s lunar ambitions. Cooperation with China has become one of Russia’s “top priorities” last year, the spokesperson said.
The Russia-China agreement gives the green light to the joint development of their own lunar space station, which calls for “the planning, demonstration, design, development, implementation and operation of research station projects. science, including promoting projects to the international aerospace community, ”a statement from China’s National Space Administration said.
It is not known what specific technical contributions would be made by Russia, whose military-civilian space agency has invested in new launch infrastructure despite a national climate of budget cuts. Russia’s space budget ranks third in the world, behind the United States and China.
China has also held talks with French space agency CNES as “state control of bilateral space cooperation between the two agencies,” CNES said on Tuesday. Among the cooperation on climate science, Kejian from Beijing and French space chief Jean-Yves Le Gall also discussed “other potential areas of cooperation in relation to the Moon and Mars,” the statement said.
[ad_2]
Source link