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A Russian crew joined the International Space Station on Friday at a time when the war in Ukraine is undermining space cooperation between Moscow and the West.
Three Russian cosmonauts joined, on Friday March 18, the International Space Station (ISS) where, 400 km from Earth, the collaboration between Moscow and Washington continues despite the war in Ukraine.
This crew, led by experienced cosmonaut Oleg Artemiev, accompanied by Denis Matveïev and Sergei Korsakov, took off at 15:55 GMT on Friday aboard a Soyuz rocket for a three-hour flight to the ISS. They were greeted by a team of two Russians, four Americans and a German, according to images broadcast by NASA.
They must complete a six and a half month mission and will replace three other members currently on board the station: Russian cosmonauts Piotr Dubrov and Anton Chkaplerov and American astronaut Mark Vande Hei, who will return to Earth on March 30.
Space cooperation in danger
Until recently, space cooperation between Russia and Western countries was one of the few areas not to have suffered too much from the sanctions decreed once morest Moscow following the annexation in 2014 of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.
However, some tensions had arisen, especially following Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed nationalist Dmitry Rogozin as head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos in 2018. The latter regularly shows his support for what Russia calls “a special military operation” in Ukraine. “Ours! For the first time in many years, it’s an all-Russian crew,” he said on Twitter a few hours before the crew took off.
This weekend, the manager said that the recent Western sanctions introduced once morest Moscow might cause the downfall of the ISS.
According to him, the functioning of the Russian vessels supplying the ISS will be disrupted by the sanctions, thus affecting the Russian segment of the station. As a result, this might cause “the ISS weighing 500 tons to splash or land”, he warned.
The thrusters of the Russian vessels docked at the station are indeed used to correct the orbit of the space structure. A procedure is carried out ten times a year to keep it at the right altitude, or to avoid space debris in its path.
Americans alone do not have this capability, confirmed Joel Montalbano, the station’s program director for NASA. “The Space Station was designed on the principle of interdependence (…) it is not a process in which one group can become separated from the other.” “Right now, there’s no indication that our Russian partners want to do things differently. So we plan to continue operations as we do today,” he said.
Repercussions on board the ISS
On board the ISS, Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts avoided talking regarding the conflict, which has already claimed thousands of lives and caused one of the largest refugee crises in Europe since World War II.
But astronaut Mark Vande Hei bore the brunt of the war of words between Russia and the West, when Roscosmos released a video jokingly saying he might stay on the ISS instead. to return to earth aboard a Soyuz rocket on March 30.
Scott Kelly, another NASA astronaut whose record for consecutive days spent in space was broken by Mark Vande Hei this week, responded to the joke by refusing a medal awarded to him by the Russian government.
The latest hitch in space cooperation, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Thursday that it had recorded the suspension of the Russian-European mission ExoMars and the search for alternatives for the launch of four other missions due to the offensive in Ukraine.
Dmitry Rogozin criticized “a very bitter event” and said that Russia might carry out this mission alone, “in a few years”.
With AFP
