STAR CITY /Moscow Region/, November 15. /TASS/. The International Space Station (ISS) will stay in service as long as it can, Roscosmos CEO Yury Borisov has said.
"We will prolong its operation as much as possible," he said at the plenary session of the 15th international conference Crewed Space Flights at the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.
Borisov stressed that the world's crewed space flight industry was heavily based on the groundwork the Soviet Union laid down in its day. Borisov noted that more than 400 experiments conducted aboard the station had enriched domestic and international science with valuable experience. This experience, he added, "is accumulating and will be used and reused in future missions."
Last November, Borisov said in an interview with TASS that further participation in the ISS project would depend on the technical condition of the Russian segment, the date when the Russian Orbital Station (ROS) will be up and running, the beginning of flights to it by Russian cosmonauts and a number of other factors.
In late February 2023, the Scientific and Technical Council of Roscosmos met in session with the participation of Roscosmos management and subsidiaries and organizations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, involved in the work of the Russian segment of the ISS. The council approved the decision to extend the lifecycle of the Russian segment of the ISS until 2028 and began preparing documents for a message to the government.
On April 12 this year, Borisov reported to President Vladimir Putin that the Russian government had extended the ISS operation until 2028.
The ISS has been in orbit since November 20, 1998. It is multi-modular and has a mass of about 435 tons. With docked spacecraft the mass can reach 470 tons. The participants in this project are Russia, Canada, the United States, Japan and ten member states of the European Space Agency (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland).