The United States has initiated prolongation of the International Space Station’s service life till 2028-2030 and corresponding work is already in progress, Russian cosmonaut, deputy director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems under the Russian Academy of Sciences, Oleg Kotov.

Axar.az reports citing TASS.

No, they [NASA] do not wish to dump it [the ISS] and they have never wished to do that. They have already initiated prolongation of the station’s operation till 2028-2030 and this work is already in progress. There are two tasks on the agenda - to persuade the government to provide funds for financing the operation of the ISS and to carry out technical scrutiny into whether it is safe to prolong the station’s life cycle," Kotov said.

Currently the ISS project’s partakers (the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency’s members Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Switzerland and Sweden) agreed to prolong the station’s operation till 2024. A decision to extend the life cycle of the ISS till 2028 is to be made in 2020. According to earlier reports, should the ISS project be curtailed, new modules for Russia’s future orbital station will begin to be built starting from 2021, with Russia’s ISS segment, detached from the ISS, to serve as the basis.