The head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said on Monday that Russia was not interested in the NASA-led Lunar Gateway project, a proposed space station orbiting the Moon, citing the existence of the country's own lunar initiative
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th January, 2021) The head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said on Monday that Russia was not interested in the NASA-led Lunar Gateway project, a proposed space station orbiting the Moon, citing the existence of the country's own lunar initiative.
Earlier in the day, a space industry source told Sputnik that Russian representatives had been booted from the expert group discussing the project due to alleged dissatisfaction of the Russian side with its limited role in the project.
"We are not interested in this. Russia has its own lunar exploration program. It will begin this year," Rogozin wrote on an unofficial Telegram channel, a link to which is posted on his Twitter page.
Meanwhile, the corporation told Sputnik that it was ready to continue consultations with the United States regarding lunar exploration but would not participate in consultations on the Gateway project.
"After reviewing the memorandum on mutual understanding concerning cooperation on the Gateway project, the Russian side decided to not participate in that program. At the same time, considering the importance of preserving the scientific and technological potential of deep space exploration, the Russian side is continuing to monitor the situation and is ready to advance the dialogue on issues of mutual interest with the US side," Roscosmos said.
In 2017, Roscosmos and NASA agreed on the joint creation of the Gateway lunar orbital station, but later Rogozin said that Russia could not afford to participate in this project due to it having been assigned an insufficiently large role.
In December, Rogozin offered NASA to create a docking module at the lunar station to receive Russian and Chinese spacecraft as the only ones capable of evacuating US crew to Earth in case of an emergency.
A Roscosmos spokesperson told Sputnik that the last time that Russia participated in multilateral talks concerning the issue of Lunar Gateway was in June 2020.
