Eric Berger, a journalist for the American publication Ars Technica, explained on Twitter why the United States no longer needs Russian manned spacecraft Soyuz MS.
“Since [America's newest reusable spacecraft] Crew Dragon has successfully demonstrated its capabilities, NASA no longer needs to buy seats on Soyuz from Russia at increasingly inflated prices,” the author wrote.
Thus, the journalist commented on the materials of the Russian media, which, with reference to the Roscosmos report for 2019, reported that NASA would not buy seats on the Soyuz MS after 2020. Subsequently, the state corporation announced that the composition of the Soyuz MS crews in 2021 will be international, but they did not specify their specific composition, in particular, whether it is about American astronauts or whether it concerns European and Japanese, buying seats from Roscosmos through NASA …
In June, a quarterly report from the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia reported that a seat on Soyuz MS for foreign partners would become cheaper due to competition with American spacecraft.
On May 30, a heavy rocket Falcon 9 was launched with the Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying American astronauts on board to the ISS. The previous time the United States independently delivered people to low-earth orbit on July 8, 2011, when the Space Shuttle Atlantis reusable manned spacecraft took off. After that, the US used Russian Soyuz series spacecraft to send people to the ISS.
According to a report from NASA's Office of Inspector General, published in November 2019, from 2006 to 2019, the cost of a Soyuz seat for the United States increased from $ 21.3 million to $ 86 million, with one Crew Dragon seat on average. worth $ 55 million.
In the same month, US Vice President Michael Pence, speaking at the Joseph Ames Research Center (California), said that Washington “will not need to fly on Russian ships” after “an American astronaut on an American spaceship from American territory into the space”.
