The change of command over the International Space Station comes a month after the NASA astronaut received control from another Russian colleague.
Sputnik is live with a broadcast of NASA commander Thomas Marshburn handing command of the ISS to Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev before departing from the station.
Changing command is a regular procedure at the Space Station. Marshburn is handing over command to Artemyev one month after receiving it from his Russian colleague Anton Shkaplerov.
Earlier on Tuesday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that cooperation on the ISS program is impossible without both the USA and Russia. In 2020, the trip to ISS was faster than a flight from Moscow to London!
The flight plan includes just two orbits before a rendezvous with the Space Station and will take just over three hours. Manned missions to the orbiting laboratory currently require some six hours between lift off and docking
From 2011 to 2020, the USA relied on Russia’s Soyuz launch system to send its astronauts to dock and live on the ISS, with America not having its own space transport capability.
But in May 2020, Crew Dragon, a reusable spacecraft made by Elon Musk’s private company Space-X, took two Americans to space for the first time on a US-made vehicle in nine years.
However, despite this progress, it appears that NASA will still need help from Moscow. The tradition of international crews, which has existed for more than twenty years, will be continued again.
Sputnik / ABC Flash Point News 2022.
Russian control the space missions?