Are The US And Russia Going To Collaborate On a Lunar Space Station?

Illustartion

Before we go any further, you must know the International Space Station is scheduled to retire on 2024 at the earliest, Still things aren't certain of what is to happen after that.

First, earlier last week a report in Popular Mechanics suggested that the US and Russia were very much preparing to collaborate on a new lunar space station to replace the ISS, called the Deep Space Gateway.

Speaking to industry sources, the website claimed that the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) would announce its intention to join NASA in putting together the station. This could be used for continued experiments in space, excursions to the surface of the Moon, and even missions to Mars.According to SpaceNews, NASA's administrator Robert Lightfoot noted that the idea for this lunar space station was still a concept. He said they had discussed with some partners about building the station – Europe and Japan, for example – but nothing was set in stone yet

It was anticipated that Roscosmos's head, Igor Komarov, would announce the news at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Australia this week. However, recently Komarov failed to mention this supposed collaboration.

Although he admitted. "We think that cooperation in the ISS project should continue," he said. However, it's still not clear what Russia's involvement will be in the Deep Space Gateway.

Meanwhile Naoki Okumura – president of the Japanese space agency, JAXA – later said they were “making a serious deliberation as to what JAXA can do if we join the Deep Space Gateway.”

Here's what seems to be a problem, a report from TASS said that Russia was considering sending its own cosmonauts to China’s planned new space station in the coming years, with construction expected to be completed in 2022. The US has infamously refused to cooperate with China at all in space, so who knows if Russian cooperation with China will be a problem.