MOSCOW, April 12. /TASS/. Russia will not abandon low Earth orbit research once deep space exploration begins, Manned Spaceflight Director at the Roscosmos State Space Corporation Sergei Krikalyov said in an interview with TASS.
"Perhaps, the future of research lies beyond low Earth orbit but it doesn’t mean that we are done here and that we will now move forward. We will continue working on low orbit," he said.
The Roscosmos executive pointed out that experiments requiring pure weightlessness would continue to take place within low Earth orbit. However, according to him, in the future, low Earth orbit will be most often used "for assembling vehicles and launching space flights into space."
Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin said earlier that Russia was entering a new stage of competition with other leading space powers, which involved manned programs, including those meant for deep space.