Russian, European space agencies to join efforts in building state-of-the-art rocket carrier

The Russian and European Space Agencies will team up to build a state-of-the-art rocket carrier for putting heavy spacecraft into orbit, Anatoly Perminov, President of the Russian Space Agency, also known by its acronym Rosaviakosmos, said.

Perminov, who is currently at the Le Bourget Air Show, said to a RIA Novosti correspondent that the Rosaviakosmos-ESA cooperation plan discussed in Moscow on June 10 and subsequently finalized and signed in Le Bourget, outside Paris, provided for the construction of such a booster before the year 2025. He said it was still too early to say precisely what kind of rocket this would be. What is clear at this point is that this new rocket will be "purely civilian" and that its function will be to launch into orbit heavy spacecraft, he said.

Speaking about Russia's Kliper shuttle project, Perminov said the European Space Agency and Japan had expressed interest in joining in and that decisions were still to be made as to how they could contribute to this project.

Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Moskovsky, who is leading the Russian delegation to this year's Le Bourget Air Show, spoke in favor of boosting multilateral cooperation in the space industry. He pointed out at a press conference that any country, however developed its space or aviation industries might be, could not achieve anything on its own these days. He lamented that the conservatism of supervising agencies hurdled the use of foreign technologies in manufacturing Russian aircraft and space vehicles. Speaking of Russian military planes designed using foreign technologies, Moskovsky cited the example of the Su-30 MKI, built for India in association with French aircraft designers.