Comment Russia announced on Tuesday that it will withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS) project after 2024, marking the end of an era in one of the last remaining areas of cooperation between Russia and the United States. The newly appointed head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency announced the decision in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, saying the agency would focus on building its own orbital station. “We will fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made,” said the head of the space agency Yuri Borisov. Russian officials have discussed abandoning the project since at least 2021, citing aging equipment and growing safety risks. Countries participating in the ISS have agreed to use the station until 2024, and NASA plans to use the station until 2030. However, the ongoing rift between Moscow and Washington over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a barrage of economic restrictions appear to have accelerated the withdrawal. Last month, the previous head of Roscomos, Dmitry Rogozin, said that talks on Russian involvement after 2024 are only possible if US sanctions against the Russian space industry and other sectors of the economy are lifted. Shortly after Russian troops entered Ukraine in February, President Biden imposed new sanctions against Russia designed to “degrade” the country’s space program. “We estimate that we will cut more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports. This will hurt their ability to continue modernizing their military. It will undermine their aerospace industry, including their space program,” Biden said at the time. In response to the sanctions, Rogozin, known for his responses and long-running Twitter feud with SpaceX’s Elon Musk, threatened that Russia would allow the station to fall to Earth. “There [is a] the possibility of a 500 ton structure falling in India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all risks are yours. Are you ready for them?’ Rogozin said then. The two parts of the station run by NASA and Roscosmos are interrelated, and it is unclear whether the ISS can be maintained if one side abandons the project. Russia is responsible for the space station’s critical propulsion control systems, which keep the ISS on track as Earth’s gravity slowly pulls it into the atmosphere. The US department is responsible for the power supply. Roscosmos under Rogozin also caused controversy when it released photos of its three cosmonauts holding the flags of two self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine, where Russia launched its invasion. The post marked the capture of Lyscychansk, the last town in what pro-Russian separatists call the Luhansk People’s Republic to fall to Russian forces and was captioned “a day of liberation to be celebrated both on Earth and in space”. The flag trick and Russia’s apparent attempts to use the project as a bargaining chip in efforts to ease sanctions have been condemned by NASA. “NASA strongly reprimands Russia for using the International Space Station for political purposes to support its war against Ukraine, which is fundamentally inconsistent with the station’s primary function among the 15 international participating countries to advance science and technology development for peaceful purposes,” the agency said. early July. But NASA has gone to great lengths to maintain the partnership and tried to prevent the war from affecting the ISS collaboration, pledging earlier this year that joint work would continue. “The Russian cosmonauts and the American astronauts are all very professional,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said June 15 during a joint news conference with his European Space Agency counterpart. “Despite the tragedies happening in Ukraine by President Putin, the fact is that international cooperation is solid when it comes to the civilian space program.” For a while, that effort seemed to be paying off. It wasn’t until July 15 that NASA and Roscosmos announced that they had reached an agreement to launch each other’s space travelers to the station, with Americans aboard Russian rockets and Russian cosmonauts traveling in SpaceX vehicles. The SpaceX launch was announced shortly after September 29th. In late March, an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts landed safely in Kazakhstan after leaving the space station in the same capsule. The ISS, the size of a football field, was launched in 1998 and has since been a staple of post-Cold War international cooperation with Moscow, surviving for decades as the US-Russia relationship soured. Its collapse will likely spawn several new stations over the next decade, as NASA is actively engaging private space companies and has awarded seed funding to at least four concept stations. Russia has set its sights on launching its own project, but Roscosmos has struggled for years financially and the cash flow has been hampered after the US shifted from using Soyuz rockets to lift its astronauts to the station and turned to SpaceX for those services. In his announcement on Tuesday, Borissov admitted that Russia’s space industry is struggling as it also needs to replace many foreign technologies that are no longer available due to sanctions. “I see that my main task, together with my colleagues, is not to lower, but to raise the bar and, first of all, to provide the Russian economy with the necessary space services,” Borisov said. “This is navigation, communication [services]data transmission, meteorological, geodetic information and so on.” Russian state media previously reported that Rocket and Space Corporation Energia is preparing a draft design for the station, called the Russian Orbital Service Station, which should be completed in the third quarter of 2023. NASA officials said Tuesday, however, that they had not been informed of Russia’s intentions and that they plan to use the station at least until 2030, when commercial space stations are expected to come online to replace the aging ISS. Speaking at a conference about research and development done on the station, Robyn Gatens, NASA’s ISS director, said NASA did not want to see the partnership end. “We want to continue together as a partnership to operate the space station,” he said. “I think the Russians, like us, are thinking about what’s next for them. And as we plan for a post-2030 transition to commercially owned and operated space stations in low Earth orbit … they’re also thinking about a transition.” He added that NASA had not “received any official word” from Russia, but that “we will talk more about their plan moving forward.” If Russia were to withdraw from the station, it would be a complicated process logistically and diplomatically. The agreement governing the space station says that while partners can withdraw at any time, they must give “at least one year’s written notice.” And while Russia’s statement said it would withdraw after 2024, it was unclear exactly when that might happen. NASA has repeatedly emphasized that NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts on the station continue to work side by side, as they have for years. And despite the turmoil on the ground, they have shown real signs of friendship. Earlier this year, when cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov handed over command of the station to NASA’s Thomas Marshburn, he said that while “people have problems on Earth … in orbit, we’re a crew.” Speaking in English, he called the space station “a symbol of friendship and cooperation and a symbol of the future of space exploration.” He thanked “my brothers and sisters in space” and praised Marshburn, saying he would be “a professional ISS commander. But it didn’t always run smoothly in space. In November, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized Russia for conducting a missile test against a satellite that created about 1,500 pieces of space debris, some of which intersected the orbit of the space station. Then came the flag incident earlier this month. Nelson issued another rebuke, calling the display of the flag “fundamentally inconsistent with the primary function of the station.”
