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NASA’s 2022 budget envisages no purchases of Soyuz seats

29 May 2021 09:10 (UTC +04:00)

NASA’s draft budget for fiscal year 2022 envisages no purchases of seats aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, but the two states will continue to cooperate on the basis of reciprocity agreements, NASA Acting Chief Financial Officer Stephen Shinn said on Friday, APA reports citing TASS.

"This budget doesn't have any planned purchase of Soyuz seats. However, we still have reciprocity agreements for us on your vehicles and vice versa. And so again, no planned Soyuz purchases but we still have the planning to use those vehicles," he said, answering to a question from TASS.

Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos hopes that the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will continue to use seats on Russia’s Soyuz crewed vehicles, Roscosmos Deputy CEO for economics and finance, Maxim Ovchinnikov, said in early April. He explained that US transportation systems and technologies were still in the tune-up phase, so there might be problems with timetables and deadlines of delivering cargoes to the ISS.

Ovchinnikov said Roscosmos was stepping up its space tourism activities and hoped that in the near future a major cash flow from this line of business would follow.