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Dimitri Rogozin, director of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, likes to flaunt his power. Since the Western countries announced different sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, he has turned Twitter into his personal battlefield, where he has given free rein to his already well-known tendency to brag. Although this time he has gone a little further. The former Russian deputy prime minister has launched all kinds of threats against those who harm the regime: from a departure from orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) and its subsequent fall on European or American soil to leave a NASA astronaut “marooned” on the orbital platform instead of bringing him back on a Soyuz spacecraft later this month.
400 kilometers above our heads, the space station is one of the last fields of cooperation between Russia and the United States. Part of it is built in Russia and operated by cosmonauts, while the other is the responsibility of the US, Europe, Japan and Canada. But both depend on each other for key services: the NASA-run side of the station provides electrical power to the Russian side, while the Russian side provides the orbital boost needed to keep the ISS from falling to lower altitudes and disintegrating in the atmosphere. land. The maneuver is performed about eleven times a year on average.
Rogozin doesn’t seem to care about the climate of international cooperation achieved over decades in space. At the end of February he practically implied that Western sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine, which affected his aerospace industry, could cause the fall of the ISS on the United States or Europe. Since the 500-ton laboratory does not fly over Russia, the country would be spared from it. Last Saturday, the head of Roscosmos returned to the attack with the same catastrophe: if the blockade continues, he could separate the Russian segment from the station. Without orbit correction, the ISS could fall out of orbit and be forced into a “splashdown or landing.”
“The populations of other countries, especially those led by the ‘dogs of war’ (Western countries) should think about the price of sanctions against Roscosmos,” he wrote on social networks, while describing as “crazy” those who have imposed these punitive measures.
‘abandoned’ astronaut
Currently, the crew of the orbital platform is made up of four NASA astronauts, one European and two Russian cosmonauts. In another sign of his growing charlatanism, Rogozin threatened to leave the NASA astronaut “abandoned” on the ISS Mark Vande Hi, who, as scheduled, will return to Earth on March 30 on a Soyuz rocket together with two cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pïotr Dubrov. Nothing indicates for the moment that Vande Hei cannot return,
Astronaut Mark Vande Hi (@Astro_Sabot) will soon return home after completing a record-breaking 355 consecutive days on the @space_station.
He joins 4 others who have spent extended time in space. His mission will help NASA prepare for future #Artemis missions to the Moon. pic.twitter.com/SFlzdHn2SG
— NASA’s Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) March 12, 2022
but if the threat were fulfilled, NASA could always resort to the Crew Dragon of the private company SpaceX. A few days earlier, the head of Roscosmos, a staunch supporter of Putin, announced that Russia would no longer supply the United States with engines for its Atlas and Antares rockets. “Send them into space on their broomsticks,” he commented.
Rogozin has also engaged in a heated dialectical battle with Scott Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut who spent a full year on the space station, to the point of even blocking him on Twitter. Kelly, commander of the ISS on three different missions, criticized Rogozin for sharing images in which international flags were ripped off a Russian rocket. “Dimon (short for Dimitri), without those flags and the badges they bring, your space program will be worth nothing,” he tweeted.
The launchers at Baikonur decided that without the flags of some countries, our rocket would look more beautiful. pic.twitter.com/jG1ohimNuX
— ROGOZIN (@Rogozin) March 2, 2022
Later, Kelly shared a screenshot of what appeared to be Rogozin’s tweet asking him to “Put it down you moron! If not, the death of the ISS will be on your conscience.”
Dimon, why did you delete this tweet? Don’t want everyone to see what kind of child you are? pic.twitter.com/xSScT2cSGu
— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) March 7, 2022
According to the former astronaut, the tweet had already been deleted. “Don’t you want everyone to see what a child you really are?” Kelly asked the Russian, who in turn replied that he was “defiant” and “destructive” and that he would not allow “you to behave like this with me”.
The Russian scientist Mikhail Gelfand, a specialist in bioinformatics at the Skolkovo Institute and one of the promoters of the open letter against the war signed by thousands of Russian researchers and journalists, precisely defined Rogozin when asked by this newspaper: “He is a very stupid idiot.” known, the subject of many jokes and memes. To meet him, you just have to take a look at his Twitter account.
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