KENNEDY SPACE CENTER /US/, October 5. /TASS/. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) seeks to extend the agreement with Russia to integrate flights, NASA’s International Space Station program manager Joel Montalbano said at a news conference on Wednesday after the launch of the Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina to the ISS as a member of the Crew-5 mission.
When asked by TASS about the agency’s plans to extend the agreement, which is still valid until 2024, Montalbano said, "As we extend Space Station good partner across the board agreement to extend past 2024, we would also extend the agreement as our goal."
Montalbano added that NASA has plans to add Boeing and its Starliner spacecraft to the program, as Starliner’s first crewed flight is scheduled for 2023.
On July 15, Roscosmos announced the signing of an agreement on joint cross-flights by Russian and US cosmonauts to the ISS. The commander of the Roscosmos cosmonaut team, Oleg Kononenko, said the agreement envisaged three flights by Russian cosmonauts on the US spacecraft Crew Dragon. Under the cross-flight program, US astronaut Frank Rubio set off for the ISS aboard the Russian spacecraft K. E. Tsiolkovsky (Soyuz MS-22) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on September 21.