The agency said in a statement: “NASA continues working with all our international partners”-including Roscosmos, the Russian space agency-“for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station.” Rogozin’s American counterpart, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson, did not respond directly. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
Rogozin was referring to the fact that the space station currently relies on Russian propulsion systems to maintain its altitude in orbit, and was apparently threatening to withdraw those services if sanctions affected the ISS-and doing it in the most thuggish way possible. Russia can’t press a button and drop it out of its orbit 260 miles above Earth. (And, although the station’s orbital path falls mostly outside of Russia, the ISS does pass over a small part of its southern border.)īefore the specter of a space station crashing in middle America starts to seem too real, let me reassure you: The International Space Station is not about to come down. Particularly because Russia is one of the nations that operates the ISS, and has two of its own cosmonauts on board. After President Joe Biden announced on Thursday new sanctions against Russia that would, among other effects, “degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,” Dmitry Rogozin responded with a series of tweets about the International Space Station: “Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS? If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and a fall on the United States or Europe? … The ISS doesn’t fly over Russia, so the risks are all yours.”Īt first glance, the statement seems, well, pretty unhinged. This week, as Russia unleashed a violent assault on Ukraine, the director of Russia’s space agency went on a rant.
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