The creation of simulators that will train cosmonauts from Russia and friendly countries to work on the Russian orbital station will start this year. According to Maxim Kharlamov, head of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, the first simulator will be put into operation in a little more than two years.

The GCTC (part of the state corporation Roscosmos) is already preparing that the home for the new generation of Russian cosmonauts in orbit will be the ROS, not the ISS. In particular, the first simulators that will thoroughly imitate the modules of the new space station will appear in the Cosmonaut Training Center before the modules themselves in orbit.

The contract for their creation begins this year. And the first in line for construction will be a full-size functional mockup of the science and energy module. This element of the station is scheduled to be launched into space in 2027 – and by that time its Earth analog will already play an important role in the training of cosmonauts.

The new modules will be located in the hall where the simulators of the Russian segment of the ISS are now located. The same classical approach will be used in the layout: in its finished form, the simulator system will be a complete complex. In addition, a separate room will also house a simulator for practicing manual control modes of the new ships.

“It will be a complex with a common dispatching training, with a single computer center, which will provide all simulators with standard models of space objects,” – explained the head of the GCTC.

In this case, additional modernization of the hydro-laboratory (in it cosmonauts learn to perform manipulations outside the station, in conditions close to weightlessness) will not be needed. The fact is that its current device already allows changing the composition of modules immersed in water very quickly. So even parallel training of cosmonauts to maintain the ISS and ROS in the same pool will be quite possible.

Development of systems of the future ROS is accompanied by a group of experts, which included Russian cosmonauts, among them – the commander of the squad Oleg Kononenko, as well as Alexei Ovchinin, Sergei Ryzhikov, and Alexei Zubritsky. However, according to Kharlamov, there is no talk of appointments to the crews yet.

January 11, 2025 marked the 65th anniversary of the founding of the Gagarin Space Center. On this day in 1960 military unit No. 26266 was formed, and eight years later the world-famous Star City appeared.