Russia's space agency to build own orbital station

Release Date: 2009-01-29

Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will propose to the government the construction of a low-orbit space station to support future exploration of the Moon and Mars, an agency official said Thursday.

"We will soon propose to our government a project to construct a low-orbit complex which could serve as a foundation for the lunar program and later on - the Mars program", Alexei Krasnov, director of manned flight programs at Roscosmos, told a news conference in Moscow. “Russia, as well as other countries, is looking at the Moon in a mid-term perspective, and would want not only to go there and come back, but to establish a lunar base, which would allow exploring Mars in future.

"These are our intentions, but we are working hard to ensure that these plans get adequate financial and legislative support from the government," the official said.

Russia, a pioneer in robotic lunar research, abandoned its lunar exploration program with the end of the Moon race in the mid-1970s, but the idea of exploring the Earth's natural satellite has been revisited recently, due to ambitious international projects to develop the Moon's resources, as a stepping-stone for further space exploration.

Roscosmos earlier said its first unmanned flight to the Moon would include a lunar orbiter to fire 12 penetrators across diverse regions to create a seismic network. These will be used to research the origins of the Moon.

Krasnov also said Roscosmos would propose extending the use of the International Space Station (ISS) until 2020, however “this decision must be adopted by the governments of all 15 countries participating in the project”.

The project currently involves NASA, Roscosmos, the Canadian Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and 11 members of the European Space Agency (ESA).

Source:RIA Novosti

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