LewRockwell By RT News
Cosmonauts won’t use American vessels over safety concerns, even if an agreement with NASA is reached
Russian Cosmonauts will not fly on American spacecraft over safety concerns. That’s according to Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the national space agency Roscosmos, who was speaking on Saturday. He added that an agreement with NASA to share seats on each other’s vessels hasn’t been reached yet.
According to Rogozin, NASA is the driving force behind the seat-swapping initiative, because the Americans do not want to “lose their flight skills on Russian ships.” The crossover system dictates that the Russian Soyuz MS will take one American, and in return one Russian will have a seat on an American ship.
NASA intends to alternate every six months between private American aerospace manufacturers SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner, once the latter is operational.
Rogozin described the troubled Boeing Starliner spacecraft as being in “critical condition.”
“It flew for the first time with trouble. The second time it couldn’t fly at all. The delay of the launch has been going on for over two years now. Now, they will try to launch it. But we will definitely not put any of our cosmonauts [on board], we cannot risk their lives,” he told Rossiya 24 TV channel in an interview.
