Russia will not permit the first U.S. commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) unless its safety is fully tested, a high-ranking official with Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said on Friday.
“We will not issue docking permission unless the necessary level of reliability and safety [of the spacecraft] is proven. So far we have no proof that those spacecraft duly comply with the accepted norms of spaceflight safety,” said Alexei Krasov, who heads the manned spaceflight department of Roscosmos.
The statement comes in the wake of media reports that the spacecraft’s designer, U.S. company SpaceX, requested NASA to authorize the docking in December.
MOSCOW, April 22 (RIA Novosti)