Why is Russia launching a new module to the space station if it’s pulling out?

The Russian Space Corporation, Roscosmos, released a photo on Monday which showed the module of the Nauka Space Station which was very anticipated attached to the fairing of the cargo. This will be an important additional first Russian for international space stations more than a decade, and it will give Russia with their first module dedicated especially for research. “Nauka” means science in Russian.

This is a large enough module, including the quarter crew, airlock for scientific experiments, and more. With a mass of around 24 metric tons, around 20 percent greater than the largest Russian segment of the station, the Zvezda service module.

Time for this launch, scheduled for early July 15 on the proton rocket, famous. For one, the multi-purpose naeka module is more than a dozen years late due to a lack of budget for the project above technical problems. Sometimes, it looks like the module never will really be launched.

In addition, Russia launched the biggest module at the time of future participation in an uncertain international space station program. Russian officials said hardware that existed in orbit, many of them were more than two decades, already aging out of repairs. Russia said they could get out of the program in 2025 and build new stations.

So why launch a new module just a few years before exiting the station? One possibility is that Russia is just a posture. Some NASA officials have speculated personally that this might be an angle to get new funds from the United States. With the success of the SpaceX crew’s dragon vehicle and approached the availability of Boeing Starliner, NASA no longer sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Roscosmos to buy Soyuz chairs for access to the station. This is an important source of funding for Russian space programs.

However, NASA wants to keep flying stations for another decade, and for this need Russia. The first element of the International Space Station was launched in 1998, and was designed in such a way that the US and Russian segments depend on the control, power, and other critical resources. NASA officials suspect Russia can seek funding “maintenance” from the United States in return to keep part of the space station.

The launch of Naeka was an important symbolic victory for the Russian space program, because it is increasingly rare for the Roscosmos to develop and fly new hardware. Mostly, this program maintains and launches a long-old spacecraft like Soyuz vehicles and proton rockets.

After being encapsulated in the fairing of the charge, it will now move to the “filling station” at Bisonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where it will be triggered and pressurized. After that, it will be mated to a proton rocket for the launch that can occur immediately after July 15.