The United States on Friday has said that it would continue flights to the International Space Station with Russia, despite its tries to separate Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. space agency NASA has said in a statement, “To assure continued safe execution of the International Space Station, save the lives of astronauts and ensure continuous U.S. presence in space, NASA will resume integrated crews on U.S. crew spacecraft and the Russian Soyuz,” U.S. space agency NASA said in a statement.
NASA stated that astronaut Frank Rubio would fly with two Russian cosmonauts on a Soyuz rocket scheduled to launch on Sept. 21 from Kazakhstan.
The statement came hours after President Vladimir Putin fired the head of Russia’s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, a firebrand nationalist as well as ardent backer of the Ukraine invasion who once joked that U.S. astronauts should get to the space station on trampolines instead of Russian rockets.
Meanwhile, NASA stated that the International Space Station was always organised to be used jointly with participation from the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan along with Canada.
“The station was created to be interdependent as well as relies on contributions from each space agency to function. No other agency has the ability to function independent of the others” it said.