Isaacman planning to meet with head of Roscosmos

WASHINGTON — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he is interested in meeting with his Russian counterpart and attending an upcoming Soyuz launch.

Asked about cooperation with Roscosmos during a news conference after the Crew-12 launch to the International Space Station on Feb. 13, Isaacman said he plans to attend the next crewed Soyuz launch to the station, scheduled for this summer from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

“I am certainly planning to attend the next crewed Soyuz launch,” he said, noting he has a “good friend that’s going to be going up on that mission, so it would be hard to imagine to miss it..”

The mission, Soyuz MS-29, will carry NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina to the ISS. Menon is married to Anna Menon, who flew with Isaacman on the Polaris Dawn private astronaut mission in 2024.

If Isaacman follows through on those plans, he would be the first NASA administrator to attend a Soyuz launch since October 2018, when then-Administrator Jim Bridenstine attended the launch of Soyuz MS-10. That mission suffered an in-flight abort but landed safely downrange of the launch site.

That 2018 trip was also the last face-to-face meeting between the heads of NASA and Roscosmos until last July, when NASA’s acting administrator, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, met with Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov at the Kennedy Space Center before the Crew-11 launch.

Isaacman said he is interested in meeting with Bakanov as well. “I know that we’re making preparations for a discussion with my counterpart at the earliest opportunity,” he said.

After the July meeting, Bakanov told Russian media he was working to broaden cooperation with NASA beyond the ISS, currently the only joint project between the agencies because of U.S. sanctions imposed after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Isaacman said his focus in any discussions with Roscosmos would remain on ISS cooperation. “The space station is going to still be up there for a long time,” he said. “There is a lot that we need to accomplish together in the years ahead. Certainly, a lot of opportunity for good conversation.”

Bakanov also said after the July meeting that he had invited Duffy to Moscow later in the year, around the time of the Soyuz MS-28 launch. That meeting did not take place, and by the time of the Soyuz MS-28 launch, Isaacman had been renominated as NASA administrator.

The discussion about a potential meeting between the heads of NASA and Roscosmos came two days after Isaacman met with the leader of one of NASA’s closest partners, the European Space Agency. Isaacman met with ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher in Washington on Feb. 11.

Both sides released few details about the meeting. “As we move forward with our return to the Moon, the European Space Agency remains a key partner across much of NASA’s portfolio. Their contributions will be important as we build a sustained lunar presence and prepare for missions beyond,” Isaacman wrote on social media.

“I had a constructive first meeting in Washington, D.C., with my counterpart at NASA,” Aschbacher wrote in his own post. “We had a very constructive discussion on space exploration and are fully aligned on our shared objectives: the Moon, LEO and Mars.”

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