China, thanks to the Russian module “Science”, will be able to fly to the International Space Station (ISS), the Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC) Energia said in a YouTube video.
As noted in the video, the specified module has an improved universal docking station – an androgynous peripheral docking device developed for the Soviet-American Soyuz-Apollo mission, which has now become an international standard.
“If necessary, any American or even Chinese spacecraft can dock to the Nauka pressurized adapter,” the video says.
It also notes that “out of 754 checks that the module must pass before launching, 306 were performed in accordance with the daily schedule for checking factory control tests.”
In September, RSC Energia First Deputy General Director Sergei Romanov announced that in November 2020 and February 2021, Russian cosmonauts will go into outer space to prepare the Pirs module of the ISS Russian segment for disconnection from the near-Earth laboratory. According to him, subsequently, in 2021, the Progress spacecraft together with the Pirs module will be flooded in the Pacific Ocean. Romanov recalled that instead of Pirs, the Nauka module will be attached to the ISS, the launch of which to the near-Earth laboratory is scheduled for April 2021.
In February, the general director of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said that the decision to write off the multifunctional laboratory module (MLM) Nauka, intended for the Russian segment of the ISS, would sign a “death sentence”.
Nauka has been under construction by the Khrunichev Center, Roscosmos's most problematic enterprise, since the mid-1990s. It was planned to launch a 20-ton module in 2007, but the dates were repeatedly postponed, twice – in 2013 and 2016 – due to the detection of contamination in fuel tanks. “Science” was supposed to become the base module of the Russian national space station after the ISS ceased to exist no earlier than 2024.
Structurally, Chinese manned spaceships are based on those produced in the USSR. Currently, cooperation between the United States, which is Russia's main partner in the ISS, and China in space projects is limited.
