PASSENGERS WANTED! RUSSIAN SPACE TRAVEL NEEDS SPACE TOURISTS

Laura Maudlin - Jun 15, 2020
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Without the Soyuz return-tickets to the International Space Station, important revenues for future projects will be missing. Roscosmos needs a new strategy for its space travel business.

After the "Crew Dragon 2" successfully docked at the International Space Station ISS on 30 May at 22:23 Moscow time, Dmitri Rogosin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, tweeted courteous congratulations to Elon Musk and also said: "I look forward to further cooperation." In fact, the alarm bells must have gone off in Moscow.

With the resumption of manned space flight by the USA, the Russian, extremely lucrative monopoly ended after almost a decade. Each seat of a US astronaut in a Soyuz capsule cost NASA 80 million dollars. Musk is reportedly offering his flights for 60 million per astronaut.

In recent years, a Twitter dialogue had developed between Musk and Rogosin. Those responsible for Russian spacecraft usually stay out of public discussions. Rogosin, as former Russian ambassador to NATO in Brussels and then deputy prime minister, is a different person.

When NASA announced a few years ago that it wanted to resume its manned flights with the help of Elon Musk's Falcon rockets, Rogosin sneered that his American colleagues might as well try to jump to the ISS on a trampoline.

Apparently, this was even an incentive for Musk and NASA to become independent of Russian help again. Now Musk tweeted back, "The trampoline worked."

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