Russia’s space agency Roskosmos is considering ending a permanent human presence in space, an agency official said yesterday following last week’s crash of a supply ship delivering precious cargo to the ISS.

“Perhaps in the future, we will not need a constant manned presence in the lower earth orbit,” Roskosmos deputy director Vitaly Davydov told journalists in Moscow.

“We don’t exclude the possibility of returning to the concept of DOS (long-term orbital) stations that we had before stations with constant human presence,” he said.

Soviet-era space station designs, which included the early Salyut station series, were not meant to constantly house cosmonauts but instead served as a base for incoming missions.

Mr Davydov’s remarks came days after a failed launch left the International Space Station without a planned delivery of 2.9 tonnes of food, water, and fuel and delayed the next manned launch by at least a month.

Russia’s space officials have for the first time warned that the current crew aboard the ISS could be evacuated, leaving the station, whose cost has been estimated at $100 billion, unmanned.

Such prospects have alarmed Nasa as “there is a bigger risk of losing the ISS if there are no astronauts on board”, according to the agency’s ISS programme chief Mike Suffredini.