The Russian space agency Roscosmos continues to threaten ISS, the cosmic home shared with Westerners due to sanctions against Russia. Relationships increasingly difficult
The International Space Station ISS is back in the sights of the general director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin. With interventions in bursts on state TV and with repeated tweets attacks and threatens retaliation on the cosmic home shared with Americans, Europeans, Canadians and Japanese. To continue to coexist and to guarantee the performances on the Russian side calls for sanctions against Russia to be lifted. The threat that he specified mainly concerns the suspension of flights of Progress automatic nacelles carrying supplies and, above all, they are used for the movements of the ISS station, periodically raising its decaying orbit and shifting it (on average a couple of times a year) and to avoid collisions with dangerous cosmic debris. The threat had already been aired in recent weeks but now Rogozin adds that he is preparing a precise examination of the situation that he will present to the Kremlin in order to politically decide what to do. Rogozin has a preferential channel with Putin. Before Putin himself chose him for the direction of the agency he was vice-prime minister for the defense industry and more than a politician than a technician of a space agency he uses contemptuous tones in communicating his intentions. On Saturday he argued that the space agencies of the countries involved have not met the deadline on Russian requests regarding Russian companies and the lifting of sanctions concerning certain materials.
Relations between Russia and the United States in space had already become difficult after 2014 due to the situation in Ukraine, so much so that Rogozin himself was banned from entering the United States to discuss NASA’s future Artemis collaboration program for the Moon and Mars. Like this Rogozin replied that Artemis was a political plan to marginalize Russia and went on looking to Beijing making a deal in March last year to jointly build a lunar space station and a future settlement; that is, an antagonistic plan to the western one. Then after the invasion of Ukraine Rogozin suspended the launches of its Soyuz carrier from its European base in Guyana with English satellites and the subsequent Galileo, the European GPS on board. Since then there has been a cascade of mutual cancellations by space agencies on scientific programs, including the exploration of Mars with the Exomars probe blocked by ESA and departing next September, followed by the plan of a joint Russian-American probe to landing on Venus. The refusal of ESA to continue with the launch of the Martian probe (Russian landing module and European rover) has given Moscow a lot of annoyance. Rogozin had just remembered that everything in Baykonur was ready to house the probe.
But the biggest and most complex node remained the ISS station shared permanently by astronauts and cosmonauts of the two fronts. Following his warnings and his requests, Rogozin complained that he had not received an answer and scornfully ESA director general Josef Aschbacher accused of merely being a “postman” because he replied that he had forwarded the requests to the various ESA supporting countries. The threat already raised in recent years is that of detach the Russian modules and to build with them an entirely Russian space station. On Telegram Rogozin recalled in the last few hours that he had received promising signals from space agencies to continue collaboration on the ISS but the answer was that “the restoration of normal relations between the partners of the ISS and other joint space projects is possible only with the complete and unconditional lifting of the sanctions».
Meanwhile NASA is evaluating with industries the possibility of using the Dragon and Cygnus automatic spacecraft which bring supplies to the base also to carry out the tasks carried out up to now by the Russian Progress spacecraft in order to guarantee the safety of the astronauts and the continuity of operations. American individuals are also moving to take over the management of the ISS for 2030; the date indicated to definitively privatize and commercialize the large base by removing it from NASA’s annual budget. So far, however, everything is proceeding normally as has been shown in recent days the return of American astronaut Mark Vande Hei who landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan together with Pyotr Dubrov of the Russian Space Agency (both for a year on the ISS) and Anton Shkaplerov. NASA doctors were waiting for him on his return and then accompany him to the United States. However, the landscape remains confused and Samantha Cristoforetti, who will arrive next month, what situation will she find?
April 4, 2022 (change April 4, 2022 | 15:47)
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