The budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States (NASA) does not provide for the allocation of funds for the purchase of additional seats for American astronauts on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, according to the NASA website.
“This budget does not contain plans to purchase seats on the Soyuz, but we still have an interchange agreement on your and our ships, so there are no plans to purchase, but we have plans to use this ship nevertheless,” a NASA representative said at a daily briefing.
In October 2020, the last American astronaut, for whom NASA bought a place on Russian spaceships, went to the ISS on the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft. Next, the flights of Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts are supposed to be carried out according to a barter scheme: the Russians will fly on the Crew Dragon and the CST-100 Starliner from Boeing, which is under development, and the Americans will continue to fly on the Soyuz.
