Turkey and Russia may sign an agreement soon for cooperation in space, the head of Turkish Space Agency told a Russian news agency.
Speaking to TASS, Serdar Hüseyin Yıldırım said: “We are building bilateral relations with countries and with international organizations, which we have identified in accordance with our national goals. We keep working on common conditions of cooperation with different countries, including Russia.”
“We have plans for signing an agreement in the near future,” he said.
Yıldırım recalled that “space exploration is a very complex and costly work.” “It requires high technologies, and for this reason international cooperation is very important in this field,” Yıldırım said.
“Our goal at the international level is to establish firm relations of partnership with regional partners and with our neighbors. As far as Russia is concerned, we have vast opportunities in many fields of cooperation. We believe that we will be able to make much faster progress, if we manage to build firm relations of partnership based on mutually beneficial cooperation,” he continued.
On February 9, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unveiled the country’s ambitious 10-year space programme that includes a 2023 moon mission, sending a Turkish astronaut to the International Space Station.
Referring to the space programme, Yıldırım said: “It reflects Turkey’s main aims, which the country set in the space sphere, and also the steps being taken for achieving them. We have ten main goals and many subtasks. We fully support and have faith in the implementation of the strategies for achieving the goals set.”
On February 10, Roscosmos said that Moscow and Ankara were in talks on a bilateral inter-government agreement for developing cooperation in space.