Comment on this story
comment
Russia announced on Tuesday that it will withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS) project after 2024, marking the end of an era in one of the last remaining areas of cooperation between Russia and the United States.
The newly appointed head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, announced the decision at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, saying the agency will focus on building its own orbital station.
“We will fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made,” said the head of the space agency Yury Borisov.
On March 29, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov handed over control of the International Space Station to American astronaut Thomas Marshburn. (Video: The Washington Post)
Russian officials have talked about leaving the project since at least 2021, citing aging equipment and growing security risks. The countries involved in the ISS agreed to use the station until 2024, and NASA plans to use the station until 2030.
But the ongoing rift between Moscow and Washington over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a barrage of economic restrictions appear to have accelerated the withdrawal. Last month, the former head of Roscomos, Dmitri Rogozin, said that talks on Russian participation after 2024 are only possible if US sanctions against the Russian space industry and other sectors of the economy are lifted.
Shortly after Russian troops entered Ukraine in February, President Biden imposed new sanctions on Russia intended to “degrade” the country’s space program.
“We estimate that we will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports. This will deal a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military. It will degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,” Biden said in that moment
In response to the sanctions, Rogozin, known for his retorts and a years-long Twitter feud with SpaceX’s Elon Musk, threatened that Russia would allow the station to crash into Earth.
“There [is a] the possibility of a 500-ton structure falling on India and China. Do you want to threaten them with this prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all risks are yours. Are you ready for them?” Rogozin then said.
The two sections of the station run by NASA and Roscosmos are interdependent, and it is unclear whether the ISS can be sustained with one side abandoning the project. Russia is responsible for the space station’s critical propulsion control systems, which keep the ISS in the correct orbit as Earth’s gravity slowly pulls it into the atmosphere. The North American segment is responsible for food.
Roscosmos under Rogozin also caused controversy when it released photos of its three cosmonauts holding the flags of two self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine, where Russia launched its invasion. The post marked the capture of Lyscychansk, the last city in what pro-Russian separatists call the Lugansk People’s Republic to fall to Russian forces, and was captioned “a day of liberation to celebrate both on Earth like in space.”
The flag stunt and Russia’s apparent attempts to use the project as a bargaining chip in efforts to ease sanctions have been condemned by NASA.
“NASA strongly condemns Russia’s use of the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine, which is fundamentally inconsistent with the station’s primary role among the 15 international participating countries to advance the science and develop technology for peaceful purposes,” the agency said. beginning of July
But NASA has done its best to keep the cooperation afloat and has tried to prevent the war from affecting the ISS partnership, promising earlier this year that joint work would continue.
“The Russian cosmonauts and the American astronauts are all very professional,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said June 15 during a joint news conference with his counterpart at the European Space Agency.
“Despite the tragedies that are happening in Ukraine because of President Putin, the fact is that the international partnership is strong in terms of the civilian space program.”
For a while, this effort seemed to have paid off. It was only on July 15 that NASA and Roscosmos announced that they had reached an agreement to launch each other’s space travelers to the station, with Americans aboard Russian rockets and Russian cosmonauts traveling aboard SpaceX vehicles . The SpaceX launch was announced sometime after September 29th.
In late March, an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed safely in Kazakhstan after leaving the space station aboard the same capsule.
The ISS, about the size of a football field, was launched in 1998 and has since been a staple of post-Cold War international cooperation with Moscow that has survived for decades as the relationship between the US and Russia deteriorated. Its demise will likely spawn several new stations over the next decade, as NASA is actively engaging private space companies and has given seed funding to at least four concept stations.
Russia has set its sights on launching its own project, but Roscosmos has struggled financially for years, with cash flow hampered after the US switched from using Soyuz rockets to lift its astronauts to the station and turned to SpaceX for these services.
In his announcement on Tuesday, Borisov admitted that Russia’s space industry is struggling as it also needs to replace many foreign technologies that are no longer available due to sanctions.
“I see that my main task, together with my colleagues, is not to lower, but to raise the bar and, first of all, to provide the Russian economy with the necessary space services,” Borisov said. “This is navigation, communication [services]data transmission, meteorological, geodetic information, etc.
Russian state media previously reported that Rocket and Space Corporation Energia is preparing a draft design for the station, called the Russian Orbital Service Station, which should be completed in the third quarter of 2023.
NASA officials said Tuesday, however, that they had not been notified of Russia’s intentions and planned to use the station at least until 2030, when commercial space stations are expected to come online to replace the aging ISS.
At a briefing on research and development carried out on the station, Robyn Gatens, NASA’s director of the ISS, said NASA did not want the partnership to end. “We want to continue together as a partnership to operate the space station,” he said. “I think the Russians, like us, are thinking about what’s next for them. And as we’re planning a post-2030 transition to commercial space stations in low Earth orbit … they’re also thinking about a transition.” .
He added that NASA had not “received any official word” from Russia, but that “we will be talking more about their plan moving forward.”
If Russia were to withdraw from the station, it would be a logistically and diplomatically complicated process. The agreement governing the space station says that while partners can withdraw at any time, they must give “at least one year’s written notice.”
And while Russia’s statement said it would withdraw after 2024, it was unclear exactly when that might happen.
NASA has repeatedly stressed that NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts aboard the station continue to work side by side, as they have for years. And despite the turmoil on the ground, they have shown genuine signs of friendship. Earlier this year, when cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov handed over command of the station to NASA’s Thomas Marshburn, he said that while “people have problems on Earth … in orbit we a crew.” Speaking in English, he called the space station “a symbol of friendship and cooperation and as a symbol of the future of space exploration.”
He thanked “my brothers and sisters in space” and praised Marshburn, saying he would be a “professional ISS commander.
But it hasn’t always gone well in space. In November, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized Russia for conducting a missile test against a satellite that created approximately 1,500 pieces of space debris, some of which crossed the orbit of the space station. Then came the flag incident earlier this month. Nelson issued another rebuke, saying that displaying the flag was “fundamentally inconsistent with the primary function of the station.”