Manned Mars Mission Not in the Offing – Russian Space Official

Excerpt from report by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS

Montreal, 27 January: A Montreal meeting of the heads of the Russian, US, Japanese, European and Canadian space agencies did not look at manned flights to Mars, an ITAR-TASS correspondent was told by the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos), Anatoliy Perminov. “If it was mentioned, then only in relation to the general principles for preparing for such flights in the future. And these principles as a whole were endorsed by all the participants,” the Roskosmos chief said.

“There can be no flights to Mars without the completion of work on the International Space Station (ISS), without exploration of the moon as part of manned programmes and the establishment of settlements there, or without the development of new orbiting stations on low orbits,” Perminov said. “And it is only if these preliminary conditions are met that one can start dreaming of a flight to Mars,” he noted. [Passage omitted]