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Roscosmos hopes to scrutinize service life of Russian segment of ISS by 2021

Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin in August made a decision to create a special commission to examine the condition of the ISS, should a decision be made to prolong its operation after 2024

MOSCOW, September 16. /TASS/. Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos is going to conclude a contract for determining the residual life cycle of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS), according to the government procurement website.

A yet-to-be selected contractor’s task will be to support the program of research and applied experiments on the Russian segment of the ISS and determine the current and residual life cycle of the structure and hulls of the Russian segment of the ISS."

The contract estimated at 1.06 billion rubles ($16 million) is to be carried out in 2019-2021.

In particular, the contractor’s task will be to determine the resistibility of the Russian segment and descent modules to the impact of meteoroids.

Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin in August made a decision to create a special commission to examine the condition of the ISS to have an idea of the endurance of all of its systems, should a decision be made to prolong its operation after 2024.

In September 2018, Russia’s cosmonaut, deputy director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems, Oleg Kotov, told TASS in an interview the United States had suggested prolonging the operation of the ISS till 2028-2030. The work is already in progress. For this the American side is to cope with two tasks - to persuade the government to disburse funds for the operation of the ISS and to look into whether it will be safe to go ahead with using it from the technical standpoint.

The current participants in the ISS project (the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency’s member-countries Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Switzerland and Sweden) have agreed to prolong the station’s operation till 2024.