Moscow: Russia will ask its foreign partners in June to extend the exploitation of the International Space Station (ISS) until 2020 as the station's Russian segment would take longer to complete, Russian space officials said.

"We can do what we planned to do by 2010 only in 2015, and so we will have to appeal to our foreign partners to use the ISS until 2020," the chief of Russia's space RKK Energiya company, Vitaly Lopota, said yesterday as quoted by the Interfax news agency.

Russia still does not have a research module at the ISS, officials said, adding that the Russian segment, which is due to contain 10 modules, would have only two small research modules, a laboratory and two energy modules by 2011.
Source : PTI