WASHINGTON _ U.S.-Russian relations have long been strained but an exception to that has always been mutually beneficial joint efforts in space. Or so it seemed.
New internal emails from NASA, shared with McClatchy and the Miami Herald, suggest the space relationship too has been increasingly strained. The reason: The secrecy surrounding the COVID-19 death of a Russian space official whose pre-launch close contact with a U.S. astronaut potentially exposed the American to the virus.
The emails center on the shocking mid-April news that one of the top officials in the Russian program, Evgeniy Mikrin, near the top of the Russian space program, had contracted the coronavirus. He died soon after the launch of a U.S. astronaut on a Russian spacecraft for six months on the International Space Station orbiting Earth.
