Russia and US agree to build new space station after ISS retires in 2024

       A month after Russia announced that it will pull out from the International Space Station and create its own base, the Russia Space Agency announced on Saturday that an agreement have been made with NASA to build a new space station after the current ISS expires.

 Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov said during a news conference on Saturday, saying that "We have agreed that Roscosmos and NASA will be working together on the program of a future space station." 

During the announcement which was made at Russia's Baikonur launchpad in Kazakhstan, Roscosmos and NASA also said they will be working together on a mission to Mars in the future.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden said. “Our area of cooperation will be Mars. We are discussing how best to use the resources, the finance, we are setting time frames and distributing efforts in order to avoid duplication.”

Komarov said that the idea to build the new station would be "open" and would include countries not currently working in the ISS.

Meanwhile, Bolden talked about NASA commercializing space activities. He said, “We [NASA] are consciously moving away from government financing of low-orbit missions,” which he said they [NASA] have been criticized for doing so.

On Friday, the Soyuz-TMA16M launched successfully carrying Russian and US astronauts to the ISS, two of whom are due to spend a record 12 months on board in an experiment to study the physical effects of long-duration space missions.

They will both be observed by doctors analyze the effects of weightlessness on the pair beyond the usual six-month deployment.

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