NASA is considering reducing its presence in Russia under new US President Joe Biden, state-run RIA Novosti news agency recitation Thursday.
In addition to its liaison office at the US embassy in Moscow, it is reported that NASA has about 90 Russian employees and service personnel in the Russian space agency Roscosmos and other spaceflight offices around Moscow. .
“Employees working at the Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City were the first to leave,” said RIA, an anonymous space industry source said.
They tied the move to the USA stopping regular flights aboard a Russian spacecraft as SpaceX Elon Musk was the first private company in the world to put people into orbit last year.
The news agency said that NASA intends to stop renting houses that were inhabited by astronauts with their families but do not intend to close the office completely.
Another business source RIA said NASA representatives reduced its permanent presence at the office of the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
NASA is the only office not to go through any changes in Russia’s Mission Control Center, which controls operations at the International Space Station, RIA said.
“It is expected that all employees of NASA’s headquarters in Moscow will be laid off, but the Johnson Space Center office at Roscosmos will continue to operate,” a third source was quoted as saying.
Roscosmos said it has not received official notifications from NASA about office and staff cuts, RIA said. European and Japanese space agencies have said they do not intend to change their presence in Moscow in any way.
Roscosmos maintains a small staff presence at NASA’s space station in Houston but has no offices in the U.S., according to the RIA.
With tensions strained over regional conflict and allegations of electoral controversy, Russia and the United States had seen a place as a rare area of bilateral cooperation in the past decade.