Acting head of NASA Steve Yurchik, in an interview with Spaceflight Now, named the possible dates of flights of Russian cosmonauts on the American spacecraft Crew Dragon and Starliner.
According to the interim administrator, the first flight will take place no earlier than next year. According to Yurchik, we are talking about the SpaceX Crew-4 mission, the launch of which will take place no earlier than the first quarter of 2022.
The acting head of NASA noted that a draft version of the corresponding “implementation agreement” between NASA and Roscosmos is still under consideration by the US State Department. After approval of this version of the agreement by the State Department, NASA and Roscosmos should begin discussing its final form.
The publication writes that after the signing of the agreement by all parties, the Russian cosmonaut will need to obtain permission to travel to the United States, make an individual spacesuit and undergo basic training for flights on the Crew Dragon.
Spaceflight Now notes that NASA is interested in cross-over flights of cosmonauts and astronauts on American and Russian spacecraft.
In March, Interfax, citing the head of the Cosmonaut Training Center Pavel Vlasov, said that the Russian cosmonaut Sergei Korsakov could go to the International Space Station (ISS) on Crew Dragon in the near future.
In May 2020, a heavy rocket Falcon 9 was launched with the Crew Dragon spacecraft with 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.
