NASA and Roscosmos sign an additional agreement to conduct joint space flights

Roscosmos announced that it has signed an additional agreement with NASA to conduct two additional joint flights to send astronauts to the International Space Station.

Regarding the issue, the director of the manned spaceflight program at Roscosmos, Sergey Krikalev, said: “RosoCosmos and NASA are planning to conduct two more joint flights to the International Space Station. The additional agreement has been signed, and technical work is underway.”

Last September, the head of the Russian Roscosmos agency, Yuri Borisov, announced that his agency and NASA were preparing to make a new amendment to the joint space flight agreement to the International Space Station. He stated that the Russian astronaut, Alexander Grebenkin, is supposed to go to the station on board a spacecraft. Crew Dragon in 2024, and the astronaut crews that will be sent to the station will be selected in 2025.

Last October, the Russian government agreed to hold negotiations between Roscosmos and NASA regarding signing a second amendment to the agreement on joint space flights aboard Russian and American vehicles.

On July 15, 2022, Roscosmos announced the signing of an agreement with NASA regarding joint space flights to the International Space Station. In turn, the leader of the Russian astronaut team, Oleg Kononenko, stated that the terms of the agreement include sending 3 flights with Russian astronauts on board to the station. Using American Crew Dragon vehicles.

Russia and Egypt manufacture “one of the most important safety elements” at the Dabaa nuclear plant

The site of the Egyptian "Dabaa" nuclear station announced that Russian companies, in cooperation with Egyptian engineers and technicians, have begun manufacturing the internal containment shell for the station's first nuclear reactor.

The website indicated that this shell or shell is called by this name because it is one of the most important elements of the passive safety systems of the reactor building, and the main function of this shell is to prevent the release of radioactive materials into the external environment in the event of an emergency.

The shell consists of five layers: a cylindrical part, in addition to a lower and upper dome. The weight of each shell is 75 tons, and the process of making each one takes about a month.

The Dabaa station channel had published on Telegram a group of pictures of the moment the station’s pumps were being manufactured.

The channel said that these pumps are being manufactured in cooperation between Russian and Egyptian engineers, noting that their role is to achieve rapid cooling of the turbines with water.

On November 19, 2015, Egypt and Russia signed a cooperation agreement to establish an atomic energy station at an investment cost of $25 billion, which Russia provided a soft government loan to Cairo.

In December 2017, Presidents Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Vladimir Putin signed the final agreements to build the Dabaa station during the Russian President’s visit to Cairo.

The Dabaa station will include four Generation 3+ pressurized water reactors with a total capacity of 4,800 megawatts (1,200 megawatts each), and the first reactor is scheduled to be launched in 2028.

Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy giant, praises the Dabaa plant with the best technologies and the highest global safety and security standards, as determined by the International Atomic Energy Agency.