The confirmation of the long-mooted move comes as ties unravel between the Kremlin and the West over Moscow's military intervention in Ukraine and several rounds of devastating sanctions against Russia, including its space sector.
MOSCOW - Moscow said Tuesday it was leaving the International Space Station "after 2024" amid tensions with the West, in a move analysts warned could lead to a halt of Russian-crewed flights.
"I think that by this time we will start putting together a Russian orbital station," Borisov added, calling it the domestic space programme's main "priority".The ISS is due to be retired after 2024, although US space agency NASA says it can remain operational until at least 2030. Until now, space exploration has been one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the United States and its allies had not been wrecked by tensions over Ukraine and elsewhere."If the ISS ceases to exist in 2024, we will have nowhere to fly," Lukashevich told AFP. "At stake is the very preservation of manned flights in Russia, the birthplace of cosmonautics."
Space analyst Vitaly Yegorov struck a similar note, saying it was next to impossible to build a new orbiting station from scratch in a few years. Yegorov said Russia's departure from the ISS meant Moscow might have to put on ice its programme of manned flights "for several years" or even "indefinitely".
But experts say Roscosmos is now a shadow of its former self and has in recent years suffered a series of setbacks, including corruption scandals and the loss of a number of satellites and other spacecraft.
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