Russia partners with China for lunar space station – The Verge

Russia and China have signed an agreement to build and work on an International Scientific Lunar Station orbiting the Moon, the countries space agencies announced Tuesday. The space powers had been in talks for months as Russia mulled over whether it would participate in NASAs Gateway program, a rival lunar space station to be built by a coalition of other countries in the next decade.

The International Scientific Lunar Station that Russia and China will work on is a complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon, Roscosmos said in a statement. It will be designed to support a variety of research experiments with the possibility of long-term unmanned operation with the prospect of a human presence on the moon, the statement said.

Like NASA, China has been courting international support for its own plans to put infrastructure on the Moon. Its also sent several robotic Change missions to the Moon, including the first landing on the Moons far side and a swift sample retrieval mission in December.

The lunar space station agreement, signed virtually between Chinas space chief Zhang Kejian and Russias space chief Dmitry Rogozin, marks the latest development in Beijings efforts to explore the Moon alongside rivals like NASA, which is barred from working with China under a law passed by Congress in 2011.

Russia, which has maintained a decades-long partnership with NASA on the International Space Station, has been reluctant to extend its space alliance with the US to the Moon.

NASA stepped up its push to return astronauts on the Moon under the Trump administration through its Artemis program. Part of that push involved spearheading a multilateral pact called the Artemis Accords, an effort to set standards of behavior in space. Nine other countries have signed the Artemis Accords so far, but Russia is not among them, after the US sought to exclude Moscow from early talks on the Accords last year.

NASA secured agreements with the European Space Agency, Japan, and Canada for work on its Lunar Gateway, the planned space station orbiting the Moon. NASA did ask Russia to be a part of building that station, but Moscow decided that NASAs request for Russia to provide an airlock for Gateway was impractical, a Roscosmos spokesperson said in December.

NASA presented the Russian-American Memorandum of Understanding to Roscosmos concerning the cooperation within the Gateway project. The MoU suggested that Roscosmos commits to provide a crew airlock module, the spokesperson said. After studying the draft document, the participation of the Russian side to the volume suggested by the US partners was deemed impractical.

Russia soon pivoted its attentions to Chinas lunar ambitions. Cooperating with China became one of Russias top priorities last year, the spokesperson said.

The Russia-China agreement greenlights joint development of their own lunar space station, which calls for planning, demonstration, design, development, implementation, and operation of scientific research station projects, including project promotion to the international aerospace community, a statement from the China National Space Administration said.

It was unclear what specific technical contributions would be made by Russia, whose military-civil space agency has been investing in new launch infrastructure despite a domestic climate of budgetary rollbacks. Russias space budget ranks third globally, behind the United States and China.

China also held talks with Frances space agency CNES as a status check of the bilateral space cooperation between the two agencies, CNES said on Tuesday. Among cooperation on climate science, Beijings Kejian and Frances space chief Jean-Yves Le Gall also discussed other potential areas for cooperation in relation to the Moon and Mars, the statement said.

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Russia partners with China for lunar space station - The Verge