BAKU, October 6. /TASS/. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sees no reason to eschew the opportunity for US astronauts to join space flights as crew members on Russian Soyuz rockets, NASA representative Sean Fuller told TASS on the sidelines of the 74th International Astronautical Congress in Baku.

"It’s really important to us to have that capability; it’s been successful and I don’t see why that should change," he said.

Fuller, who previously served as director of NASA Human Space Flight Operations in Russia and Kazakhstan, said that the use of Soyuz for astronaut flights is very important to the US. "It’s been successful, [we] look forward to that continuing in the future," he emphasized.

The NASA representative recalled that Russian cosmonauts also travel to the International Space Station (ISS) on American commercial spacecraft. Such cooperation, according to Fuller, is particularly important in the event of an emergency evacuation of the entire station crew. "One potential example is a crew member on a vehicle is ill and needs to return, be it the US commercial vehicle or the Souyz, [then] that whole crew comes home [to Earth]," he explained.

As an example of the successful implementation of cooperation with Russia in the field of flights to the ISS, Fuller cited the expedition of cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who returned to Earth on September 27 aboard the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft after the longest mission to the ISS in history.

In July 2022, Roscosmos and NASA signed an agreement on cross-flight missions to the ISS, entailing Russian cosmonauts on American Crew Dragon spacecraft and American astronauts on Russian Soyuz MS spacecraft. The negotiations, which had been underway since 2021, were not hampered by the tightening of sanctions against Russia following the launch of the special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The agreement called for six flights between 2022 and 2024, involving three Russians and three Americans. In 2023, the program was expanded by one mission: in the first half of 2024, Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin is expected to fly to the ISS as part of the Crew-8 crew.