In two moves that took place in quick succession, the Kremlin announced last Friday (15) the departure of Dmitry Rogozin from the command of Roscosmos, and the corporation, which acts as a Russian space agency, closed a deal with NASA, its American counterpart, for the exchange of seats between spacecraft of the two countries in sending crew members to the International Space Station (ISS).
With that, cosmonaut Anna Kikina should fly aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, with takeoff scheduled for September, on flight Crew-5. Later on, but still in the same month, astronaut Frank Rubio should fly in the Russian spacecraft Soyuz MS-22. For each country’s next mission, Andrei Fedyavev will fly with the Americans, and Loral O’Hara, with the Russians.
The initiative has already been negotiated for months, with two goals in mind: to maintain stability in cooperation between the participants in the ISS consortium, led by the US and Russia, and to ensure that even if either side has problems with their vehicles, there will be always crew members from both countries to watch over their modules in the orbital complex.
Negotiations, however, were delayed, in part by the creation of obstacles by the Russian side, led until then by Rogozin – a histrionic figure, who already ordered (in peacetime) NASA to use a trampoline to go to the ISS without Soyuz and dispatched cosmonauts to unfurl the flags of the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia during the war aboard the station – which, for the first time, led to official protests by NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency) regarding the Russians in the complex.
The two decisions, the agreement and the change of leadership at Roscosmos, help to put a lid on a relationship that had been moving towards greater and greater turmoil. But that doesn’t mean that Rogozin, one of the architects of escalating friction, has fallen out of favor. On the contrary. A staunch supporter of President Vladimir Putin, he tends to “fall up” and take on another prestigious post in the Russian administration. For his place at Roscosmos, the Kremlin has appointed Yuri Borisov, the Russian deputy prime minister — as loyal to the regime’s leader as Rogozin, but probably more restrained in his public demonstrations.
The ISS is essentially the last bastion of Russian cooperation with the West in space. The station becomes unfeasible if one of the two major partners, Russia or the US, decides to leave it, which explains the pacification. But this should not, at least for the moment, extend to other partnerships. The ESA, last week, officially ended cooperation with the Russians in the ExoMars program, and several commercial launches that would be made by Russian rockets have already passed to American and European companies. In the medium term, without partnerships, the Russian space industry tends to advance even faster in the scrapping process it has suffered in recent years.
This column is published on Mondays, in Folha Corrida.
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