Russia and the US cooperate to build a space station on the Moon

Russia and the United States have just reached an agreement to cooperate in building the first space station on the Moon. This is part of a long-term plan to send humans to Mars.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will jointly build a new space station called Deep Space Gateway in lunar orbit. This will be an international base for human and robotic exploration of the Moon and a stopover for spacecraft.

"We have agreed to cooperate in the project to build the Deep Space Gateway international space station in lunar orbit," RT quoted Roscosmos President Igor Komarov as saying on the sidelines of the International Astronaut Conference in Adelaide, Australia, on September 27.

NASA said the agreement reflects the two space agencies' shared vision for human space exploration. Russia and the United States will work together to build systems needed to conduct scientific missions in orbit and on the surface of the Moon and Mars.

Simulation of the Deep Space Gateway space station in lunar orbit.

"The station's components and equipment, as well as the life support system, will be built based on Russian designs," Roscosmos said.

The Russian side said the two sides also discussed using Moscow's Proton-M and Angara rockets and other spacecraft to build infrastructure for the lunar space station. The main activities of the project are expected to begin in 2020.

“We understand that we play a key role and we must carry out these tasks together,” Komarov said. “The station will be an important platform for future research.”

Experts have welcomed the agreement, seeing it as a symbolic start of US-Russia cooperation on deep space exploration.

Space exploration is one of the few areas of international cooperation between Russia and the United States that has not been affected by political tensions between the two countries. Russian and American astronauts have worked together on the International Space Station (ISS), which has been orbiting Earth since 1998.

According to Zing