The war in Ukraine is also taking place in space. Russia threatens Western space agencies to cease all collaboration, jeopardizing the future of the International Space Station.
The International Space Station might simply crash into Earth, warned Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. The leader, an active supporter of Vladimir Putin in the war in Ukraine, explained on Twitter that the sanctions taken by Europe, the United States and Canada are jeopardizing the ISS.
Propaganda or reality?
The Russian segment of the station allows, among other functions, to correct its orbit. An operation carried out ten times a year, including to avoid space debris. Without Russian help, the ISS might land or splash down anywhere in the world… But probably not in Russia, according to Dmitri Rogozin!
The latter has indeed indicated that his country would surely be spared by the fall of the ISS. This will not be the case for other countries, in particular those which have imposed sanctions on Moscow! Until we see a thinly veiled threat and a kind of blackmail at the crash of the space station, there is still a step that remains to be taken.
Roscosmos sends written appeals to @NASA Canadian Space Agency и @this with a demand to remove illegal sanctions from our enterprises – contractors of works in the interests of #ISS pic.twitter.com/0NM2Stuft1
— ROGOZIN (@Rogozin) March 12, 2022
First of all, this speech is part of the Russian propaganda which seeks to reduce the sanctions once morest the country, which also affect the Roscosmos. And then NASA has already let it be known that it is working on solutions so that the ISS can continue to operate without the help of the Russian agency.
There remains the more delicate problem of supplying and moving crews between Earth and the ISS, via Soyuz spacecraft and Progress cargo ships. It is a Russian launcher that is used to send these transport vehicles… Nevertheless, this should not prevent the return to solid ground of Mark Vande Hei, American astronaut, and his Russian colleagues Anton Chkaplerov and Pïotr Doubrov on March 30 .
