MOSCOW. March 11 (Interfax) - NASA has purchased a seat onboard a Russian spaceship for its astronaut because of the insufficient reliability of U.S. spaceships, Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin said.
"It looks like their 'trampoline' does not work so well. Flights to the ISS have not been stable, so there is an urgent need to take precautions and to transport their guy on our spaceship in order not to leave the station (their segment) unsupervised," Rogozin said on Facebook.
Roscosmos granted NASA's request "to avoid irreparable problems at the station as a whole," he said.
"This has nothing to do with a seat swap. The partners have concluded a contract with us. Not directly, but via their contractor. This is more convenient for them, and we do not mind. We will invest the earnings into new projects. In fact, this is it," Rogozin said.
The state corporation said on Wednesday that NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei would be a crewmember of the Soyuz MS-18 spaceship to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) on April 9. NASA said, for its part, that a Russian cosmonaut will get a seat onboard a U.S. spaceship in 2023 in exchange.
Soyuz MS-18 was supposed to have an all-Russian crew for the first time in 20 years, but, according to Roscosmos, NASA asked for a seat for its astronaut at the end of 2020. As a result, Vande Hei will replace Russian cosmonaut Sergei Korsakov in the Soyuz MS-18 crew.