Until Western-led sanctions imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine are repealed, Russia has said it will cease cooperation on the International Space Station. NASA and the European Space Agency, as well as the country’s space agency, have been notified that they would no longer be involved in the project. On Twitter, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, announced the decision and said he will submit a timetable for the completion of current projects to the Kremlin. Roscosmos has been threatening, delaying, and canceling projects since sanctions against oligarchs linked to Vladimir Putin’s warring regime were imposed.

Soyuz flights currently return the majority of people to Earth, while Elon Musk’s SpaceX Crew Dragon has made four visits to the ISS since its first mission in 2020. Three Americans and three Russians make up the present crew, while a German rounds out the roster for the trip. Rogozin previously asked, “Who would save the ISS?” if Russia were to abandon the project. US-based billionaire Elon Musk responded with the name of his private spaceflight enterprise, ‘SpaceX’.

Asked on Twitter if this meant that SpaceX would prevent the International Space Station from crashing to Earth, Musk simply said: “Yes.” A symbol of post-Cold War detente, the ISS is divided into two halves, with the US providing life support and the Russians providing propulsion, which prevents it from falling back to Earth. If Russia leaves the ISS, Rogozin previously stated that the US or Europe might take up its duties, although the US has stated that running the satellite on its own would be “extremely challenging.”. When NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth this week, he was accompanied by two Russian equivalents.

A few days earlier, three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station in yellow and blue flight suits, which some interpreted as a show of support for Ukraine and a humiliation for the Putin dictatorship. The sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and Japan are intended at disrupting the financial, economic and manufacturing activity of our high-tech firms,’ Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted today. In terms of mass, the ISS is the largest single human-built structure in outer space to date. Since November 2000, a multi-national crew, mainly from the United States and Russia, has manned it.

According to the European Space Agency, it is not owned by a single country and is a ‘co-operative programme’ between Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada, and Japan. In a series of tweets, Rogozin revealed that he had written to the space agencies of each of the countries that participate in the International Space Station. A number of organizations responded to his query, including the European Space Agency, which stated it would forward the issue to all EU member states for further debate. Withdrawing cooperation on a space telescope and on the International Space Station had already been done by Russia with Germany.

Soyuz’s sharing arrangement with Arianespace in French Guiana has also been terminated by Roscosmos. Threatens to withhold U.S.-made OneWeb satellites constructed by the UK unless they are guaranteed not to be utilized for military purposes. Later, OneWeb canceled its plans to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Soyuz rocket. After a four-hour trip from the ISS, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and two Russian cosmonauts returned to Earth this week after their mission. NASA reported that the three were “working professionally together without friction” despite continued tensions with Russia.

On March 30, they and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov disembarked from the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spaceship and landed in Kazakhstan’s steppe. To the northeast of Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the landing zone is approximately 250 miles away. Rescuers report that the crew is doing well after landing; Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin posted on Telegram messenger. Were there hints that tensions between Moscow and Washington had spilled over into a long-standing collaboration between the two former Cold War adversaries? The combined US-Russian return mission from the ISS was widely studied for signs of this.