HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Any diplomatic tensions between the United States and Russia haven't spilled over into the space programs between the two nations, a NASA astronaut said Tuesday.
Richard Mastracchio joined Michael Hopkins at Marshall Space Flight Center to discuss their recent six-month mission to the International Space Station.
During a briefing with the media, Mastracchio was asked about a comment from a Russian official that suggested NASA launch its astronauts to the ISS using a trampoline rather than a Russian Soyuz rocket. With the retiring of the space shuttle, the U.S. has been hitching rides to the space station on Russian rockets.
"After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline," Rogozin said in April via his Russian-language Twitter account, according to an NBC News report.
"We're working on it, right?" Mastracchio said with a smile on Tuesday. "We don't call it a trampoline, though. We're working on launch vehicles to get U.S. astronauts back to orbit and that's a great thing. We need to get U.S. astronauts launching from the U.S. and we're working on it so that will happen pretty soon."
NASA is developing the Space Launch System – a giant rocket designed to send Americans to deep space – at Marshall Space Flight Center.
As for U.S.-Russian relations, Mastracchio said any friction hasn't affected the space programs at all. NASA has said that any issues with Russia will not prevent the U.S. from its role on the space station.
"It's like any relationship," he said. "There are high times and low times. And I think maybe Russia and the U.S. may be going through some tough times in terms of the relationship. In terms of the space program, our relationship with them is fantastic. At the working level when we're in orbit with the cosmonauts or training with them, these guys are our friends.
"We don't look at them as our foes or worried about sanctions we have against them or they have against us. We're just guys working together to try to accomplish a mission. At the working level with the engineers and the scientists and the crew members, the relationship is fantastic. Of course, as you get higher and higher up in the chain, maybe the relationship is not as good. I don't know; I'm not involved in all that. But it's really no impact on us in orbit or us in training in any way."