Russia's new federal space program will allocate a whopping 321 billion rubles ($8.2 billion) to the development and utilization of the International Space Station, a byword for global space cooperation that Moscow threatened to abandon earlier this year over the crisis in Ukraine.
At a meeting with the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin was quoted by news agency Interfax as saying Russia's 2016-25 program, which is in the final stages of government approval, will heap extra funds on the $100 billion international project, "including new [space station] modules and the OKA-T automated spacecraft."
OKA-T is a major addition to the space station proposed by Russian engineers early on in the ISS program, but so far unrealized. It will be used for special research that the current facilities aboard ISS cannot conduct, and will spend most of its time flying along side the space station, rather than docket to it.
INC News, 24/09/2014
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