Russia’s space agency is planning to move training for space missions to the International Space Station (ISS) to abandoned facilities in Crimea, a senior agency official said, potentially forcing the United States to send astronauts to the territory annexed by Russia last year.
Since Washington does not recognize Russian ownership of Crimea, the move risks undermining Russia-U.S. cooperation in space.
Cosmonauts have practiced emergency landing and survival scenarios in Crimea since the early days of the Soviet space program, using the peninsula’s mountains, plains and surrounding Black Sea for a variety of training exercises. In 2007, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, moved those portions of the training program back to the main training center in Zvyozdny Gorodok (“Star City”) outside Moscow.
But after Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March last year, Roscosmos is eying a return to the region in 2016.
Yury Lonchakov, a Roscosmos official and head of Russia’s cosmonaut training center, told the TASS news agency on Friday that “there is a plan next year to move ocean [survival] training to Crimea.”
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow did not respond to a request for comment on how the U.S. Government would respond to such a move. NASA’s chief official in Russia, Sean Fuller, told The Moscow Times he was unaware of any notification from Roscosmos that it was being considered.
Asked how a Crimean training program would affect the agency’s partnership with NASA, Roscosmos spokesman Mikhail Fadeyev told The Moscow Times, “the issue is being studied, and all decisions will be announced later.”
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