Russian space officials, envisioning a cosmonaut and astronaut one day setting foot on Mars together, on Friday offered the United States use of their Mir space station.
Calling for far broader and deeper cooperation in space, the Russian officials also offered their Soyuz spacecraft as an emergency crew rescue vehicle for the proposed U.S. space station Freedom.Yuri Semenov, general director and chief designer of the Energia (energy) scientific and industrial complex that produces Soviet spacecraft, told a Senate subcommittee that his country's and America's officials have been talking about more joint space ventures "far too long."
"It is time to move from words to deeds," he said. "We could present a number of interesting projects for international cooperation; we could carry out a whole series of proposals."
Among them, he listed joint satellite efforts to monitor the weapons and missile technologies of third countries and using Soviet RD-170 rocket engines, which far outstrip the carrying capacity of any launch vehicle in the U.S. inventory, to launch a joint space platform.
Such a platform could be equipped with mirrors to divert radiation away from the Earth and more sunlight to it. It also could be used to clean up space debris and even to reconstruct the ozone layer, Semenov told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA.
"I am an optimist," he said, describing a long-term joint venture to explore Mars, using the moon as a takeoff point. "And I believe citizens of our two countries will be the first to jointly step on Mars."
NASA Administrator Richard H. Truly told the panel his agency is most interested in the possibility of adapting the Soyuz spacecraft for use as an emergency crew rescue vehicle for the U.S. space station, which is expected to be manned in the year 2000.
"Frankly, we must do a thorough engineering assessment before we can say whether this is technically feasible or not," Truly said of the Soyuz craft. "I just think it's much too early to say yea or nay."
He said talks between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Secretary of State James A. Baker III last week cleared the way for dispatching a team of NASA experts to the Soviet Union within the next "weeks or very few months" to do that technical assessment.
But Truly joined the subcommittee's chairwoman, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and senior Republican, Sen. Jake Garn of Utah, in rejecting a proposal by some lawmakers to buy the Soviets' Mir space station as an alternative to continuing work on the $30 billion Freedom station.