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The current status of the ISS partnership can, of course, change. It’s been a half month since Russia invaded Ukraine, which set off a chain of events that have been felt all over the world.
Because of the invasion, the West and Russia no longer talk to each other about space. For example, SpaceNews counted 16 commercial launches that were supposed to take place on the Russian Soyuz rocket over the next two years. Now, these payloads are stuck, which is a problem for customers like the private company OneWeb, the European Commission, and the Swedish government. Sources say that ExoMars, the joint mission between Europe and Russia that was supposed to go to Mars this year, will be delayed for years and may even be canceled.
This has, of course, made people wonder what will happen to the International Space Station, which has 15 partner countries and is the crown jewel of NASA and Russia working together in space. Russian “threats” to leave NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the space station have been in the news a lot in the past few days. Vande Hei is set to come back to Earth at the end of March in a Soyuz capsule that will land in Kazakhstan. NASA workers will be there to meet him and take him back to the United States.
This “news” that stranded Vande Hei seems to have come from a video that came out more than a week ago on RIA Novosti, a site that is close to the Kremlin. Roscosmos TV gave the video some of its footage, but when it did so, it said that the video was a “joke.” Given the tensions on Earth, this joke is very bad, but this video from a week ago does not mean that Russia is threatening to leave Vande Hei behind. Since the video came out, nothing has changed.
Since the start of the crisis, NASA officials have said that work on the space station with Russian colleagues has gone as usual. One NASA source said Friday, “Operations have not changed at all.” Joel Montalbano, who runs NASA’s International Space Program, will talk about upcoming spacewalks at a news conference on Monday. He is likely to say the same thing.
Also, Vande Hei couldn’t be left behind. At the moment, Raja Chari, Kayla Barron, and Thomas Marshburn are also living on the International Space Station. There is also a German astronaut named Matthias Maurer who is part of the allied team. NASA has its own way to get to and from the station, so Vande Hei can be sure that NASA will send her home safely whenever it wants.
The current status of the ISS partnership can, of course, change. It could do that so fast. Russia is doing bad things in Ukraine, so the West has reacted by putting harsh sanctions in place. No one knows for sure if Vladimir Putin will pull Russia out of the International Space Station. Some Russians might think he looks “strong” if he makes it look like he is leaving a NASA astronaut in space for his own people to see.
But there are no signs that this is going to happen. The first step towards trouble in the ISS partnership would probably be if Russia called back its cosmonauts training for future missions in the United States or if NASA called back its flight controllers in Moscow and astronauts at Star City. That has not been the case.
For the reasons that Ars explained in a story about the International Space Station on Monday, it is still in the best interest of the US and Russia to keep flying the station. At least in the short term, both sides need to work together to keep going.
This doesn’t mean that Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of Russia’s space programme, won’t keep making big, nationalistic claims on Twitter. Since the war started, he has been doing this, and now a banner that says “Russian Lives Matter” is at the top of his Twitter feed. But Rogozin’s comments seem to have nothing to do with reality. Someone who says that not launching the OneWeb satellites and not sending the Russian rocket engines will cost the West $8 billion and $4 billion, respectively, is not making sense. When it comes to rocket engines, Northrop Grumman will now buy them from US suppliers for its Antares rocket. This is likely to be a net gain for the West.
So it looks like Rogozin is playing to his home crowd. His actions are certainly disgusting to people in the West. But it doesn’t seem like many people in the Russian space program, who keep working hard to keep a space station that is 20 years old and by far the biggest spaceship ever built by humans, in the air.
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