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The U.S. will pay Russia $70.7 million for a single shuttle ride aboard the country’s Soyuz rocket Tuesday night, even as President Barack Obama fights for sanctions and penalties against Russia for its recent invasion of the Ukraine.
With politicians wrangling over the most diplomatic way to respond to Russia’s aggression, NASA said the space pay-off to the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) wouldn’t be affected by politics.
“We do not expect the current Russia-Ukraine situation to have an impact on our longstanding civil space cooperation with Russia, which goes back decades, including our partnership on the International Space Station (ISS) program,” Trent Perrotto, a spokesman for the space agency, told FoxNews.com.
“We are confident that our two space agencies will continue to work closely as they have throughout various ups and downs of the broader U.S.-Russia relationship.”
'If NASA had received the President’s requested funding, we would not have been forced to sign a new contract for Soyuz flights.'
- NASA administrator Charles Bolden
NASA astronaut Steve Swanson will join Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev aboard a Soyuz rocket set to blast off from a launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:17 p.m. EDT Tuesday night (early Wednesday morning in Russia).
Because the U.S. doesn’t presently have its own way to get astronauts into space, it relies upon Russian rockets to do so. Last April, NASA signed a new agreement with Russia governing six flights through 2017, at a cost of $70.7 million per seat. At the time, NASA administrator Charles Bolden blamed Congress for failing to fund a replacement ride.
So then they come out with all this bull crap and yes its total bull crap if you ask me. So what happened exactly with NASA and why are they coming up with all this bull crap - See more at: www.abovetopsecret.com...