On Friday, in a press conference, Anatoly Perminov, the head of Roskosmos, has revealed the future plans of the space agency for the next three decades.
According to media reports, Anatoly Perminov said that
Together with
For the moment, NASA is planning to launch an unmanned mission to the Moon in the fall of 2008. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a robotic mission designed to create a new type of comprehensive, digital map of the Moon's features and resources, necessary to cost-effectively, but mostly will focus on selecting safe landing sites for future human missions. Also NASA hope to return the Moon by 2020.
US and
Beside the unmanned mission,
Also, as outlined in its future strategy, Roskosmos intends to complete the construction of its section of ISS by 2015 and the space agency also plans "major modernisation" to the Soyuz craft.
Perminov also revealed that in 2009 the first Russian tourist will make a trip to the International Space Station. The head of Russian space agency didn’t disclose the identity of the man, but he said it’s a young businessman and politician.
The tourist space flights are operated by the Russian space agency together with US-based company Space Adventures and a price of a flight to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft is now $30 millions
Until now there have been only five space tourists. The last space tourist was Charles Simonyi, 58, a Hungarian-American billionaire who flew to the ISS earlier this year. His predecessors are Denis Tito (2001) and Gregory Olsen (2005), both of the United States; Mark Shuttleworth of South Africa (2002) and the world's first female space tourist Anousheh Ansari, a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin, who flew to the ISS in 2006.