“NASA continues to work with all of our international partners, including the Roscosmos State Space Corporation, for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station,” NASA said in a recent statement, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a military operation. ordered by its president Vladimir Putin.
Space exploration remains a militarized domain, despite the promise of peace and cooperation that the ISS is supposed to represent. So what happens to the ISS after this dramatic event without parallel in Europe?
Consequences for the international space station
The International Space Station is a modular project formed by a multinational collaboration between five agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and the CSA .
What impact could the conflict over Ukraine have on the International Space Station?
Despite the neutral words of NASA, Roscosmos has not been slow to respond to the United States sanctions against the Russian aerospace industry due to the new war conflict. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dmitry Rogozin reiterated that applying new sanctions against Russia’s space program could have some disastrous consequences for its adversaries.
Biden has imposed a new wave of sanctions against the country, with the aim of isolating it economically from the rest of the world and actively undermining the Russian space program.
The director of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, made a very neutral statement on the situation. However, US President Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia have led the director of Roscomos, Dmitry Rogozin, to use social networks, specifically Twitter, to threaten the United States regarding its relationship with the International Space Station. Rogozin, stated that Russia is ready to withdraw from this joint venture; and, “without Russia, the ISS will probably fall on Europe, the United States or even India and China”, the director of Roscosmos said in his tweet, in a clear warning.
To put in context, so far, the Russian segment of the space station is the one that is in charge of keeping the station in the correct orbit, at 340 kilometers of altitude (and traveling at an average speed of 7.66 km per second) in low earth orbit. Without regular adjustments, that is, without Russia’s responsibility for the stability of the ISS orbit, it would fall back to Earth.
Until now, the four US astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station have been “largely insulated” from tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the former head of the National Space Council.
“They can’t operate without us, we can’t operate without them, so it’s a truly international partnership,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.
The International Space Station was launched in 1998 and has been continuously occupied since 2000, when NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became its first crew. The ISS is divided into two main sections, the Russian and American orbital segments, and they depend on each other for their operational survival.
Let’s not forget that Russia is still heavily involved in other space projects such as ExoMars, which is scheduled to launch in September 2022.
Will the launch still stand after the conflict with Ukraine?
