ALMATY. June 8 (Interfax) - Officials from CIS countries have decided against the resumption of the work of the Interstate Council for Space, chairman of the Kazakhstani National Space Agency (Kazcosmos) Talgat Musabayev has said.
The decision was made at the third conference of representatives of CIS space authorities in Almaty on Friday.
"We are deciding that it is premature to set up an interstate council for space today because we have very different standards of space activities. But in the future we expect to come to such an interstate council when these standards more or less even out," he said to reporters.
He said that the decision on the formation of the Interstate Council for Space was made back in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said that the issue was also raised at the second conference of representatives of CIS authorities for space operations in Minsk in 2011 but remained unsolved "because the developments took different courses in different countries."
The conference in Almaty was attended by representatives of Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.
The CIS website says that the Interstate Council for Space was set up under an agreement of CIS member-states dated December 30, 1991. The May 15, 1992 agreement on the procedure of maintaining and using space infrastructure facilities in the interests of implementing space programs implied that the Interstate Council for Space would also coordinate the use of the space infrastructure for interstate and national programs of exploring and using outer space.
The CIS governments on November 13, 1992 signed a protocol approving the regulations of the Interstate Council for Space. They described the council as the coordinating body for shaping and implementing interstate programs of exploring and using outer space.
However, the council never started the full-scale operations implied by its founding documents. The absence of the necessary funding was not the only reason. The other was that at that time the space cooperation of CIS countries was almost only bilateral.