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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Borisov, I know that preparations are underway for a new ISS mission. How is this work proceeding? Let us begin with this issue.

Head of Roscosmos Yury Borisov: Mr President, this work is now in its final stage, and we are currently completing comprehensive crew training tests.

The three-person crew includes cosmonaut Marina Vasilevskaya from our fraternal Republic of Belarus. She was selected in December 2022 from among six contenders, and she started training in August 2023. She has already completed her training, passed all the exams, and she is ready to lift off. Oleg Novitsky, the crew’s commander, is not a rookie cosmonaut. NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, due to replace Loral O’Hara (who has spent six months aboard the ISS) is the third crewmember.

We are expecting the Soyuz-25 spacecraft to deliver them to the ISS on March 21, and we will be waiting for them to come back on April 2.

Vladimir Putin: I see.

I know that there are other issues as well. Please continue.

Yury Borisov: Yes, Mr President, but, first of all, I would like to thank you on behalf of the sector’s large staff for your care in addressing our immediate challenges. Of course, your deep immersion in the essence of these issues and nuances deserves deep appreciation; in turn, we assume specific obligations. We appreciate this very much.

I would like to draw your attention to the following points.

We are completing the Angara-5M launch complex at the Vostochny Cosmodrome. We hope that the first launch will take place in the first ten days of April. This is a highly important event for the country; we will strengthen the ground-based space infrastructure. As you know, we already operate one launch site in Plesetsk, and this will become a standby launch site. That’s why it is very important to us.

We continue a series of accident-free launches. Quite recently, we added a Meteor-M 2–4 satellite to the weather satellite cluster. By the way, we launched 18 small satellites together with it, including one contributed by our colleagues from Iran.

We are getting ready to receive our colleagues from BRICS countries. Russia chairs BRICS throughout 2024. We will also meet with our colleagues from national space agencies. We worked closely with them last year, and we have tremendous prospects. I will inform you about our proposals on this issue.

We are working intensively to popularise space exploration among the population, especially young people. We really care who will replace us in 10–15 years, and who will continue our work. For example, we are now actively working on projects to popularise space careers together with the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova.

These are the main aspects that I wanted to report to you.

Mr President, this year marks the 90^th birthday anniversary of Yury Gagarin, our wonderful cosmonaut who wrote his name in golden letters in the history of the global space programme. I would like to present you with a portrait of him. This portrait is a symbol of the Cosmos Pavilion that you opened after its reconstruction in 2018. I hope that you will be filled with optimism, while looking at it, and that you will feel confident that we will accomplish all our objectives.

Vladimir Putin: Thank you very much.

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