Russia is certainly getting very good at making threats. Today, President Vladimir Putin threatened nuclear war or something. He put Russia’s nuclear forces on “high alert,” according to media reports.
Now, Dmitry Rogozin, the director-general of Russia’s space program, Roscosmos, tweeted out a threat to the International Space Station, saying that U.S. and NATO sanctions could “destroy our cooperation on the ISS.” He also suggested that the ISS could crash in the United States or Europe.
There are currently four NASA astronauts, two Russian cosmonauts, and one European astronaut onboard the space station.
According to CNN, Biden further stated that the sanctions “will degrade (Russia’s) aerospace industry, including their space program.”
In response, Rogozin said on Twitter: “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?”
He added: There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?”
Rogozin also mentioned that the ISS’s location and orbit in space are controlled by “Russian Progress MS cargo ships.”
According to the European Space Agency, the Russian segment of the ISS is responsible for guidance, navigation, and control of the entire complex. And Russia’s Progress cargo ships occasionally give the ISS a boost into higher orbit when necessary.
Pointing to Russia’s controlling function on the ISS, Rogozin said Biden is “out of the loop” and is unaware that it is due to the Russian systems that the space station can dodge “dangerous conjunctions with space junk.”
Rogozin said the space junk comes from the United States’ “talented businessmen.” He didn’t name names, but that’s likely a reference to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, whose company is building a huge satellite-internet constellation called Starlink. (Rogozin apparently has complicated feelings about Musk; he once invited the billionaire entrepreneur for tea.)
Rogozin failed to mention that Russia is blocking significant international cooperation in limiting space debris. Several times a year, the ISS must perform maneuvers to avoid a dangerous piece of space junk.
But Rogozin is not making idle threats. If Roscosmos were to withdraw its cooperation, it would severely impact the space station’s operations.
Without Russia, NASA would have to engineer a new solution to help keep the station on the right path in space, so that the vehicle does not slowly fall out of orbit and enter Earth’s atmosphere. “If the Russians walk away, then you’ve got this massive object that’s going to come back in randomly somewhere over the Earth,” Wayne Hale, former program manager of NASA’s Space Shuttle and a member of NASA’s Advisory Council, tells The Verge. However such a scenario would take quite a while to manifest, possibly giving NASA some time to devise an alternate solution. “It’s not like a week, it’ll probably be several years,” says Hale.
But the Russians heavily rely on NASA to keep the space station active, too. NASA also helps to control the space station’s position in orbit, and the space agency is solely responsible for generating electricity for the entire vehicle. When it comes to the ISS, the NASA and Roscosmos relationship is a symbiotic one, and either party leaving would spell trouble. “Either we’re going to stay together, or the thing is not going to work,” says Hale.
Hopefully, the war will be mercifully short and relations between the U.S. and Russian space agencies won’t suffer a catastrophic rupture. Otherwise, NASA will be scrambling to come up with solutions to some very complex problems.
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