The Russian invasion of Ukraine has raised doubts about the future of the International Space Station (ISS), long a symbol of post-Cold War cooperation where astronauts and cosmonauts live and work side by side.
The ISS has been at the center of several threatening tweets published by the head of the Russian space agency, Dmitri Rogozin, who warned on Thursday (24) that US sanctions could “destroy” cooperation between the two countries and said that the space platform research would rush towards Earth without Russia’s help.
Experts see these threats as part of heated political rhetoric, given the two parties’ mutual trust in the safety of their people. But they could hasten a long-awaited divorce.
“No one wants to jeopardize the lives of astronauts and cosmonauts with political maneuvers,” John Logsdon, a professor and space analyst at George Washington University, told AFP. “It was a very conscious decision when Russia joined the station in 1994 to make the station interdependent,” he added, a decision that took into account concerns about cost and speed.
hostile tweets
The ISS, a cooperation between the United States, Canada, Japan, Europe and Russia, is divided into two sections: the American orbital segment and the Russian orbital segment, each built and managed by its country. Currently, the ISS relies on a Russian propulsion system to maintain its orbit, while the US segment is responsible for electricity and life support systems.
Rogozin referenced this codependency in a series of hostile tweets published shortly after US President Joe Biden announced sanctions against the Russian aerospace industry: “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from flying out of orbit without control? and land on American or European territory?”, asked Rogozin, noting that the station does not fly over much of Russia.
NASA responded with a bland statement, emphasizing that it “continues to work with all international partners, including the Federal Space Agency Roscosmos, for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station.”
Julie Patarin-Jossec, a French academic and author of a book on the ISS, noted that Rogozin “is a political figure, known for being very loyal to power” and has a history of virulent statements. Those aboard the station are highly trained professionals and are unlikely to be affected,” she told AFP.
Julie added that withdrawing from the ISS program would leave Russia without a manned space program unless it quickly turns to working with China aboard the Tiangong space station, under construction, which houses a three-member crew.
Long story
Cooperation between the United States and Russia dates back to the height of the Cold War, and it is not without its ups and downs.
After the United States sent the first men to the moon in 1969, then US President Richard Nixon looked for opportunities to make the space program more cooperative and invited allies to join the space shuttle program.
“In parallel, he and Henry Kissinger decided to use a possible joint US-Soviet mission as a symbol of detente,” explained John Logsdon. This led to the historic Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975, when American spacecraft docked for the first time, in an event broadcast worldwide on TV.
The partnership was supposed to expand further, with possible space shuttle missions to one of the first Russian space stations, but President Jimmy Carter scrapped those plans after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Russian officials approached the Bill Clinton administration with the idea of ​​a merger, paving the way for the launch of the first ISS module in 1998.
The space station has weathered geopolitical storms in the past, most notably Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, but the current tension, the most severe since the Cuban missile crisis, according to Logsdon, could mark the beginning of the end.
