Russia and China have sealed a partnership for the building of an International Scientific Lunar Station, an infrastructure on the Moon that according to a report, would rival the planned Gateway of NASA.
The Verge specifically reported that the partnering agencies' announced that they signed an agreement to work on the said station orbiting the Moon.
The two space powers had been into discussions for months as Russia reportedly mulled whether it would partake in the Gateway program of NASA, a rival space station to be developed by an alliance of other countries in the next 10 years.
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ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano (L) prepares for launch to the International Space Station in the Soyuz MS-13 rocket with Expedition 60 Soyuz Commander Alexander Skvortsov of Roscosmos (R) and flight engineer Drew Morgan of NASA (C), Saturday, July 20, 2019 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
International Scientific Lunar Station
In a statement Roscosmos, the space agency of Russia, said that the International Lunar Station partnership will work on the complex of investigational research facilities developed on the surface and/or the Moon's orbit.
The project will be designed to support various research experiments with the probability of long-term uncrewed operation, but also with the view of a presence of a human on the moon.
China, like NASA, has been seeking international backing for its own plan of putting infrastructure on the Moon. It has also sent numerous robotic Chang'e missions to the Moon, as seen on DW News' YouTube video below, which includes the initial landing on the far side of the Moon and a rapid sample retrieval mission in December 2020.
The Agreement
This lunar space station agreement signed virtually between Zhang Kejian, space chief of China and Dmitry Rogozin, space chief of Russia, marks the most recent development in the initiatives of Beijing to explore the Moon together with rivals including NASA, which, under a law passed in 2011 by Congress, was barred from collaborating with China.
Russia, which has maintained decades of partnership with NASA on the International Space Station, has been hesitant to extend its partnership in space with the United States to the Moon.
NASA, for its part, secured agreements with the European Space Agency, Canada and Japan for a project on its Lunar Gateway, the planned space station, also orbiting the Moon.
According to a Roscosmos spokesperson, NASA did ask Russia to take part in building the said station. However, the spokesperson explained, Moscow decided that the former's request for the country to provide an airlock for its Gateway project was "impractical."
China's Other Space Deals
A China National Space Administration statement said that the agreement between Russia and China greenlights shared development of their own lunar space station. It also called for planning, presentation, design, construction, implementation and operation of scientific experiment station projects which include the promotion of the project to the international aerospace community.
It was not clear what particular technical contributions Russia would make. Essentially, this country's military-civil space agency has invested in new launch infrastructure in spite of a domestic climate and financial rollbacks. More so, the space budget of Russia ranks third worldwide, behind the US and China.
Meanwhile, China also held talks with CNES, the space agency of France, as a status check of the bilateral space alliance collaboration between two agencies.
Among alliances on climate science, Kejian of Beijing and Jean-Yves Le Gall, space chief of France, discussed other possible areas too, for cooperation in relation to the Moon and Mars, according to the statement.
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