By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -NASA’s new temporary administrator on Thursday held a rare face-to-face meeting in Florida with Russia’s space agency chief, where they discussed cooperation on the moon and maintaining the space powers’ longstanding relationship on the International Space Station, Roscosmos said.
The talks between Sean Duffy and Dmitry Bakanov at the U.S. space agency’s Kennedy Space Center represented the first in-person meeting between the heads of NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, since 2018.
NASA said late on Thursday the two chiefs “discuss continued cooperation and collaboration in space,” without providing further details.
The meeting coincided with an attempt to launch a joint astronaut crew from Florida to the ISS that was postponed due to weather. It was a significant moment for Washington’s bifurcated space relations with Russia – especially for Duffy, an acting NASA administrator who was assigned to the role just this month while also overseeing the Transportation Department.
Roscosmos showed on Telegram a video of the meeting between Duffy and Bakanov, each flanked by staff, and other events where Bakanov and his delegation can be seen mingling with U.S. officials.
The Russian space agency said “the parties discussed further work on the ISS, cooperation on lunar programs, joint exploration of deep space, continued interaction on other space projects.”
Roscosmos and NASA did not respond to questions about the nature of the lunar program or deep space discussions. Such talks could signal thawing relations between the two countries’ civil space programs and represent a shift in global space relations.
UKRAINE WAR ISOLATES RUSSIA
Russia had plans to participate in NASA’s flagship Artemis moon program until it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. It became a partner on China’s moon program, the International Lunar Research Station, a direct rival to the U.S. Artemis program.
The war in Ukraine has led to a vastly isolated Russian space program, which has since boosted investments in military space efforts while nearly all of its joint space exploration projects with the West collapsed.
The Russian delegation visited NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Wednesday and on Thursday was poised to watch the launch of Crew-11, a routine mission to the ISS featuring two U.S. astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut. But bad weather pushed the launch to Friday morning, SpaceX said.
While U.S.-Russian tensions over the war in Ukraine have limited contact between NASA and Roscosmos, they have continued to share astronaut flights and cooperate on the ISS, a 25-year-old totem of scientific diplomacy crucial to maintaining the two space powers’ storied human spaceflight capabilities.
Amity on the $100 billion ISS is buoyed primarily by a technical interdependency: the Russian segment relies on power generated by American solar panels, while the task of maintaining the station’s altitude is assigned to Russia’s thrusters. Multiple other countries depend on the ISS for microgravity research, prominently the European Space Agency, Canada and Japan.
The military space programs of the U.S. and Russia meanwhile have an adversarial relationship. The U.S. has accused Russia of developing a nuclear space weapon and deploying counterspace weapons and spy satellites near American spy satellites. Russia has denied many of Washington’s space allegations.
Bakanov and Duffy were expected to discuss extending the two countries’ astronaut seat exchange agreement – in which U.S. astronauts fly on Russian Soyuz capsules in exchange for Russian astronauts flying on U.S. capsules – and the planned disposal of the ISS in 2030, according to Russian news agency TASS.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis, Anna Driver and Jamie Freed)
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