WASHINGTON — The acting administrator of NASA will meet with his Russian counterpart in the first face-to-face meeting between agency heads in several years.
Roscosmos announced on social media July 28 that the agency’s director general, Dmitry Bakanov, would visit the United States to attend the launch of the Crew-11 mission, scheduled for no earlier than July 31. That mission includes Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.
Roscosmos said that Bakanov’s trip would include a visit to the Johnson Space Center, and a subsequent post showed him touring a mockup of the International Space Station and the mission control center there. Bakanov was also scheduled to visit Boeing facilities for the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle.
The trip, Roscosmos added, would also include a meeting with Sean Duffy, acting NASA administrator, at the Kennedy Space Center. The agency called it the first meeting of the heads of NASA and Roscosmos in several years, with the two planning to discuss the continuation of the existing agreement to exchange seats on Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles as well as the future of the ISS.
NASA has said nothing publicly about Bakanov’s visit, including the meeting with Duffy. The agency hadn’t even publicly announced Duffy’s plans to go to Florida for the launch until a social media post July 30 showing him and his family at the Kennedy Space Center, meeting with the four Artemis 2 astronauts who are also there for training.
NASA did not provide an on-the-record response to questions July 29 about why Duffy agreed to meet with Bakanov or the topics of discussion, as well as if Duffy had met yet with the leaders of any other space agencies since being named acting administrator July 9. An agency official, speaking on background, would only confirm that Bakanov and Duffy planned to meet at KSC.
After an event on Capitol Hill July 29 in his primary role as secretary of transportation, Duffy did state he planned to meet with Bakanov. According to media reports, he said that despite “wild disagreement” between the United States and Russia on Ukraine, the countries would retain “points of agreement, points of partnership” such as cooperation on the ISS. “Through hard times, we don’t throw those relationships away,” he was quoted as saying.
The “wild disagreement” that Duffy referred to is the Russian invasion of Ukraine nearly three and a half years ago, which largely severed relationships between NASA and Roscosmos outside of the ISS partnership. Bill Nelson, NASA administrator at the time of the invasion, said frequently that the agencies maintained a “professional” relationship in ISS operations, but no activity beyond that, including meetings with his Roscosmos counterpart.
The last time that the heads of NASA and Roscosmos met in person was in October 2018, when the NASA administrator at the time, Jim Bridenstine, met with the director general of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA then invited Rogozin to come to the United States for a reciprocal visit in February 2019, but withdrew the invitation after congressional criticism, when several senators noted that Rogozin was sanctioned for his role as deputy prime minister when Russia annexed Crimea and occupied part of eastern Ukraine in 2014.
The closest to an in-person meeting between agency leaders since then was in October 2021, when Rogozin met with NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy during the International Astronautical Congress in Dubai.
Bakanov, unlike Rogozin, has not been sanctioned by the U.S. government. Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed him director general of Roscosmos Feb. 6, replacing Yuri Borisov. He was previously deputy minister of transport.