NASA and Russia team up to put moon's first space station

National Aeronautical Space Administration (NASA) and Russia have agreed to build world's first lunar space station. The representatives of NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos announced that they had signed an agreement to work together at International Aeronautics Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

The main aim of the project is to build an International Space Station that could be a waypoint to lunar surface or even a for the more distant planetary object such as Mars, reported popsci.com

"While the deep space gateway is still in concept formulation, NASA is pleased to see growing international interest in moving into cislunar space as the next step for advancing human space exploration," NASA administrator said in a statement.

"Roscosmos and Nasa have already agreed on standards for a docking unit of the future station. Taking into account the country's extensive experience in developing docking units, the station's future elements will be created using Russian designs," said Igor Komarov, Roscosmos's general director.

The cooperation can help both the countries to accomplish the goal of enabling gateway for various space missions. Not only America and Russia, but Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency are all interested in the project. Private spaceflight players are also interested as the station starts building.

The reason for the participation is mainly due to plans of colonizing the moon. Russia, for its part, has long had plans to colonize the moon and wants to send astronauts there by 2029 at the latest. Teaming up with NASA could help them achieve those goals more quickly, according to the reports.