The Russian Space Station will be called ROSS (Russian orbital space station perhaps?)
It won't use existing Russian ISS modules. It will be all-new modules. They will be orbited by Angara A5M rockets (bigger and newer than Soyuz boosters) from Vostochny in the Russian far east.
ROSS will be in an entirely different orbit than the ISS, an almost polar orbit which will enable polar research.
The Russians say that they will continue to use their ISS modules while ROSS is being built, so that they apparently won't be pulling out of the ISS in 2024 after all.
It will be built in two phases, starting in 2028. The first phase should be complete by 2030 they say. So it likely won't be ready until the ISS's planned deorbit. So ROSS is less a competitor to the ISS than to the proposed Axiom Station that's slated to replace the ISS. The Russians are thinking ahead about what to do when the ISS is gone.
Roscosmos says that it will only be occupied by cosmonauts part of the time, and will operate by remote control the rest of the time. They say this will be more efficient. They anticipate two crewed flights to ROSS every year, but these won't be six month missions, but only 2 or 3 months long. They say that most of the electricity on the ISS goes to crew life support and without crew aboard, that electricity can be used for experiments.
The Russians plan to keep manufacturing their old 1960's vintage Soyuz crew and Progress cargo capsules until 2030 or so. They have a new crew capsule under development and a new cargo capsule as well (which might be a variant on the new crew capsule) but they aren't expected to debut until late in the decade.
The Russians say that they have plans to return humans to the Moon, but not until the 2030's some time. They say that they want to land multiple uncrewed landers first so as to build up an infrastructure on the Moon to support humans once they get there. They aren't concerned about other countries being there before them, and say that the Moon is big enough for everybody.
And Roscosmos has a new logo, featuring a red star. Kind of a 'Back to the USSR' motif.
And I just tried to go back to the Roscosmos page and it was gone. I suppose that I'm now on an FBI watch list for trying to log onto Russian government sites.
Here's their new capsules under development. I'd call it slow development, but there's the Boeing Starliner...
Jul 28, 2022 02:29 AM
(This post was last modified: Jul 28, 2022 03:13 AM by Yazata.)
![[Image: FYq3PVhXEAAHQ43?format=jpg&name=small]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FYq3PVhXEAAHQ43?format=jpg&name=small)