The ISS has been continuously occupied since 2000 under a US-Russia-led partnership.
Washington:
Russia’s new space chief announced Tuesday that his country plans to withdraw from the International Space Station after 2024, but senior NASA officials said Moscow has not formally expressed its intention to end its two-decade-old orbital partnership with the United States. States to end.
While heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have cast months of doubt over future US-Russian space cooperation, the announcement by Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed director-general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, came as a surprise. .
The two former Cold War adversaries signed a crew exchange agreement less than two weeks ago that would allow US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts to share flights with each other’s spacecraft to and from the International Space Station (ISS) in the future.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson has issued a statement reiterating the US’s commitment to keep the ISS in operation until 2030, adding that the space agency is “coordination with our partners.”
“NASA has not been notified of any decisions made by any of our partners, although we continue to build future capabilities to ensure our large presence in low Earth orbit,” he said.
Launched in 1998, the ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2000 by a US-Russia-led partnership that also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
“Of course we will fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to withdraw from the station after 2024 has been made,” Borisov told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
Robyn Gatens, NASA’s ISS director, said its Russian counterparts have not communicated the intent required by the intergovernmental agreement on the orbiting research platform.
“Nothing official yet,” Gatens said in an interview at an ISS conference in Washington. “We didn’t get anything official.”
White House spokesman Karine Jean-Peters also said Moscow “has not formally notified the United States of its intention to withdraw from the ISS.”
“We are exploring options to reduce the potential impact on the ISS after 2024 if Russia withdraws,” she added in a briefing to reporters.
Tense space relationships
The space station was born in part from a foreign policy initiative to improve US-Soviet relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War hostility that spurred the original US-Soviet space race.
The ISS settlement, which has endured numerous tensions over the years, has been one of the last links of civil cooperation as Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine plunges Washington-Moscow relations to new post-Cold War lows. brought.
NASA and Roscosmos were in talks to extend Russia’s participation in the ISS until 2030. The White House this year approved NASA’s plans to continue using the ISS until then.
NASA officials had previously said bilateral cooperation aboard the space station remained intact.
Borisov’s comments on Tuesday followed a pattern similar to that of his predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, who occasionally expressed his intention to withdraw from the ISS during his tenure — contrary to official talks between NASA and Roscosmos. .
Asked for clarification on the Russian space station’s plans, a spokeswoman for Roscosmos Reuters referred to Borisov’s comments without saying whether they represented the agency’s official stance.
The American and Russian segments of the ISS, which span the size of a football field and orbit about 400 km above the Earth, were built deliberately to be intertwined and technically interdependent.
For example, while US gyroscopes provide daily control over the orientation of the ISS in space and US solar panels increase power to the Russian module, the Russian unit provides the propulsion used to keep the station in orbit.
“You can’t have an amicable divorce,” Garrett Reisman, a retired NASA astronaut and current professor of astronautics at the University of Southern California, told Reuters in an interview. “We’re kind of stuck together.”
Former Russian space chief Rogozin had previously said Russia could not agree to expand its ISS role beyond 2024 unless the United States lifts sanctions against two Russian companies blacklisted for alleged military ties. Putin ousted Rogozin as space chief on July 15 and replaced him with Borisov, a former deputy prime minister and deputy defense minister.
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