MOSCOW, July 29, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - The head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos arrived in the United States on Tuesday to meet with his NASA counterpart in the first such meeting in eight years, Roscosmos said.

Space has been one of the few areas of cooperation between Russia and the United States after Moscow's offensive on Ukraine brought relations between the two space pioneer nations to lows not seen since the Cold War.

"Dmitry Bakanov, head of the Roscosmos delegation, arrived in Houston to meet with NASA leadership. This is the first face-to-face meeting between the heads of the Russian and US space agencies in eight years," Roscosmos said in a statement.

At the meeting with NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy, Bakanov will discuss "continuation of the cross-flight programme" and "the extension of the International Space Station's (ISS) operation," he said in the statement, as well as plans for de-orbiting the ISS to the ocean.

The Russian official is also due to meet the NASA's Crew-11 mission team, including cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, ahead of the launch aboard the SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft, scheduled for July 31.

The recently-appointed head of the Russian space agency will also visit NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Centre as well as Boeing's and SpaceX's facilities producing spacecraft.

As part of the slew of sanctions imposed on Russia since its assault on Ukraine, many Western countries ceased partnerships with Roscosmos, but Soyuz remains one of the few spacecrafts capable of reaching the ISS.

Russia's space programme, which for decades has been a source of great pride for the country, has been suffering for years from a chronic lack of funding, corruption scandals and failures such as the Luna-25 probe in August 2023.