Moscow. October 6. INTERFAX - NASA is preparing an agreement with Roscosmos on cross-flights, a Russian cosmonaut can fly on an American ship in the fall of 2022, said Joel Montalbano, head of NASA's ISS program.
"Last week I was in Moscow, talking with colleagues from Roscosmos. I tried to promote this agreement. We have made minor changes, we are preparing an agreement for Roscosmos to submit it to its ministry for consideration. Our goal is to have an astronaut in the fall of 2022 as part of the Dragon Crew-5 mission and, according to the contract, free of charge, to have an American on the SOYUZ in the same time period," Montalbano said at a press conference of the Crew Dragon-3 mission.
The ROSCOSMOS annual report for 2020 reported on the preparation of a draft agreement with NASA on cross-flights.
Earlier, the executive director of ROSCOSMOS for manned programs, Sergey Krikalev, told INTERFAX that the state corporation supports the resumption of "cross" flights to the ISS on Russian and American ships.
"There are talks about cross-flights, when a representative of the American segment will fly on our ship, and a representative of the Russian segment will fly on an American ship. From a technical point of view, both we and the Americans, professionals who work in this environment, agree that this is the right and necessary approach," Krikalev said.
According to him, this "requires a certain confirmation of the governments both here and the Congress on the American side."
"The bureaucratic work continues, we believe that this is the right scheme," he added.
Since 2011, the delivery of crews to the ISS was carried out only by Russian ships, before that there was a cross-system, according to which American astronauts received seats on Russian ships, and Russian cosmonauts - on American ones. In 2020, NASA reported that they were negotiating with ROSCOSMOS on the return of the crossover system.
