Russia warns of dropping ISS if sanctions continue

Despite the fact that the United States Aerospace Agency NASA continues to work hand in hand with all its international partners, the Roscosmos  State Space Corporation warned that if cooperation in this order is blocked, the International Space Station (ISS)  will fall on USA or Europe.

This controversy arises after President Joe Biden announced various sanctions against Russia, including some in the area of ​​space.

Faced with this situation, the general director of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, threatened with the fall of the International Space Station.

“If the United States blocks cooperation with us, who will save the ISS (International Space Station) from an uncontrolled descent out of orbit and a fall on the US or Europe?”, the director mentioned.

Who went on to mention the following; “There is an option to drop a 500-tonne structure in India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect?”

 

Julie French academic and author of a book on this platform, Patarin-Jossec, stressed that Rogozin “is a political figure, known to be very loyal to power”, with a history of making virulent statements.

Onboard the stations is Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov; Americans Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and German Matthias Maurer, highly trained professionals and unlikely to be affected, he told AFP.

If it withdraws from the ISS program, she said, Russia will be left without a manned space program unless it quickly turns to work with China aboard the Tiangong space station, which is still under construction and houses a crew of just three. members.

Cooperation between the United States and Russia has a long history dating back to the height of the Cold War, but it has not been without its twists and turns.

After the United States sent the first men to the Moon in 1969, President Richard Nixon looked for opportunities to make the space program more cooperative and invited allies to join the space shuttle program.

“In parallel, he and Henry Kissinger decided to use a possible joint US-Soviet mission as a symbol of detente,” according to Logsdon .

That led to the historic Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975 when US and Russian spacecraft docked for the first time in a globally televised event.

The partnership was supposed to be further expanded with possible Space Shuttle missions to one of the first Russian space stations, but President Jimmy Carter rejected those plans after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

It wasn’t until after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Russian officials approached the Bill Clinton administration with the idea of ​​a merger, paving the way for the launch of the first ISS module in 1998.

The ISS has weathered geopolitical storms in the past, most notably Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, but the current tensions, which Logsdon said were the most serious since the Cuban missile crisis, could mark the beginning of the end.