NEW YORK, October 29. /TASS/. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos may hold joint training sessions for mixed missions to the International Space Station (ISS), Kathy Lueders, the associate administrator of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate, announced at an online news conference on Friday.
"The Russians based on the number of missions that the SpaceX had flown, they have agreed to further the processing of our intergovernmental agreements where we eventually would be flying US crew members on the Soyuz and the Russian cosmonauts on the US SpaceX vehicle," she said.
"We are very excited to see that we have made progress with them (Russia - TASS) at least on the first steps going forward and have our initial cosmonauts beginning to do assessments and training with suits and us beginning to do the training for that," she added.
On October 26, Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin said that the Russian space agency and NASA had begun detailed talks about flying crew members for missions by Russian cosmonauts on board US SpaceX vehicles and NASA astronauts on board Soyuz spacecraft.