Popular Mechanics by Anatoly Zak Sep 21, 2017
In a major space policy decision, Russia will promise to join a NASA-led effort to build an international human outpost in the vicinity of the Moon. Russian industry sources told Popular Mechanics that the head of Roscosmos State Corporation, Igor Komarov, is expected to announce the news next week during a meeting with other space agencies at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.
NASA and its partner agencies plan to begin the construction of the modular habitat known as the Deep-Space Gateway in orbit around the Moon in the early 2020s. It will become the main destination for astronauts for at least a decade, extending human presence beyond the Earth's orbit for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Launched on NASA's giant SLS rocket and serviced by the crews of the Orion spacecraft, the outpost would pave the way to a mission to Mars in the 2030s.
Partners on the International Space Station program including the European, Canadian, and Japanese space agencies have been conducting quiet but intensive consultations with NASA about their contributions to the near-lunar station. But Roscosmos, which played a key role in building the ISS, has taken a back seat until now.
According to industry sources, some Russian space leaders saw the U.S.-led near-lunar station as a distraction from Kremlin's main goal of sending Russian cosmonauts to the surface of the Moon and building a long-term base. Roscosmos was also considering an indigenous Earth-orbiting space station to follow up the ISS, to be maintained either in parallel with its lunar exploration effort or as a backup strategy if the lunar idea was too expensive.
However, the TsNIIMash research institute, Russia's key space strategy think tank, concluded the agency would not be able to fund the Earth-orbiting space station and the lunar program at the same time. Moreover, the latest Russian plans for the development of a super-heavy rocket powerful enough to carry cosmonauts to the Moon were recently pushed back toward the very end of the 2020s.
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http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/news/a28304/russia-nasa-cis-lunar/
