Nasa and Russia's Roscosmos join forces to build space base orbiting the MOON

RUSSIA and the US have agreed to cooperate to build the first space station orbiting the moon as part of a long-term project to send humans to Mars.

The two rival nations will work together to build a base called the Deep Space Gateway.

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A picture released on September 27 of Earth taken by the MapCam camera on the Nasa OSIRIS-REx spacecraft

AFP or licensors

The supermoon is seen behind a Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft on the launchpad of a Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan

This scheme involves building a crew-tended spaceport in lunar orbit that would serve as a "gateway to deep space and the lunar surface," NASA has said.

Nasa said the agreement reflected the two agencies' common vision for human exploration.

"While the deep space gateway is still in concept formulation, NASA is pleased to see growing international interest in moving into cislunar space [the area between the earth and the moon] as the next step for advancing human space exploration," said Robert Lightfoot, acting administrator at NASA headquarters in Washington.

The Russians and Americans would cooperate to build the systems needed to organise scientific missions in lunar orbit and to the surface of the Moon, Roscosmos said.

The Russian space agency said it would work with Nasa "to develop international technical standards which will be used later, in particular to create a space station in lunar orbit."

Space exploration is one of the few areas where international cooperation between Russia and the US has not been wrecked by tensions over Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere.

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Russia and the US work side by side on the International Space Station, which has been orbiting Earth since 1998.

"We understand that we are key players and we have to work on these missions together," Komarov said.

"The station will be a serious platform for future research," he said.

Experts hailed the announcement as a symbolic beginning of US-Russian joint work on deep space exploration.

Nasa

Nasa's Cassini probe snapped this incredible image of Saturn

"It's better to fly together to the Moon than think who will strike first," Igor Lisov, an editor at Space News, an industry journal, told AFP.

Russia sent the first man into space in 1961 and launched the first Sputnik satellite four years earlier.

These key accomplishments of the Soviet space programme remain a major source of national pride in Russia.

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