Over the weekend, Anatoly Perminov, the head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, held a press conference in which he reassured that relations between Russia and the United States will go on, business as usual, as far as space is concerned. Even though political tensions between the U.S. and Russia are rising, Perminov has promised that Russia will do its best to keep politics out of space.

The Roscosmos director is well aware that in just two years, the Soyuz Space Capsule will remain the only mode of transportation for astronauts wanting to reach the International Space Station until 2014 or 2015 until Lockheed Martin’s Orion spacecraft is built. Thus, Russia will need to assist the U.S. in getting astronauts and supplies to the ISS. There’s opportunity for lots of cash to be made for the Russian space agency, as the future of space exploration will have a solid base in capitalism, a fact which Mr. Perminov undoubtedly knows.

"Cooperation is first and foremost international and it cannot be said that space has any boundaries," he said at the conference.

This is all the more true since it’s looking like the amplifying economic problems the U.S. is facing could conceivably delay the 2015 date set for the maiden flight of Lockheed Martin’s Orion, warn some experts.

Even though under U.S. law, it is prohibited for NASA to spend tax money on Russian services due to Russia’s alleged ties to weapons proliferation to North Korea and Iran, Congress has officially made it legal for NASA to acquire seats aboard upcoming Soyuz missions. In regards to this, NASA and the Russian space agency have an arrangement settled through 2011. It’ll be interesting to see if Russia is tempted to increase prices for those seats once the Space Shuttle program is fully decommissioned and NASA is fully dependent on the former soviet craft. And after all why shouldn’t it, it’s capitalism.