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Tag: International Space Station

Despite Everything, American-Russian Relations on the International Space Station Appear To Be Solid

August 5, 2022 / / 0 Comments

The International Space Station, which orbits 248 miles above Earth,  in what is called low-Earth orbit. Its long success as an international collaboration has been tested by the Ukraine war. (NASA)

Late last month, it appeared that Russian participation in the International Space Station would end in 2024 — or so seemed to say the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos  Thirty years of unusual and successful cooperation would be coming to a close as the Ukraine war appeared to make longer-term commitments impossible, or undesirable for the Russian side.

But on a day when the Ukraine war raged for its 163rd day, when new Western sanctions were being put into place, when a Russian judge gave WNBA star Brittney Griner a provocative 9-year prison term for carrying small amounts of cannabis oil as she left Moscow, and just a short time after what seemed to be the Russian announcement of that 2024 departure,  NASA officials held a commodious press conference with Roscosmos Executive Director for Human Space Programs Sergei Krikalev and others involved with the ISS.

Together they spoke yesterday (August 4) of expanding American-Russian cooperation on the mission and discounted talk of a 2024 Russian exit.

“We always talk of spaceflight as being team support,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations, which oversees the ISS. “And this news conference will exemplify how it is a team sport.”

She then discussed  how and why a Russian cosmonaut would soon take a SpaceX flight to the ISS as part of a new program under which Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts can fly on each other’s ISS-and-homeward-bound spacecraft.  The flight by veteran cosmonaut Anna Kikina will mark the first time a Russian has flown on an American spacecraft.

In the press conference, Krikalev then insisted that Russia had no intention of leaving the station in 2024 but rather would begin looking at the logistics of departing at that time — with an eye to leaving for their own planned space station in the years ahead.

“As far as the statement for 2024, perhaps something was lost in translation,” he said. “The statement actually said Russia will not pull out until after 2024.  That may be in 2025, 2028 or 2030.”   He said the timetable “will depend on the technical condition of the station.”

In the good-natured spirit of the press conference, Krikalev said that he was “happy to see so many faces I’ve known for many years.” 

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The European Space Agency Cuts Ties to Russia On Its ExoMars Mission. But U.S-Russian Cooperation Continues on the ISS

March 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover had been set to search for signs of life on the surface of Mars, with its launch set for this year. Its future is now in doubt because of a suspension of relations with its Russian partners due to the sanctions imposed following of the Russian invasion of Ukraine . (ESA/ ATG medialab)

The European Space Agency has decided that is currently impossible to continue any ongoing cooperation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and is moving forward with a “fast-track industrial study” to define how the mission can proceed without the Russians on its ambitious ExoMars astrobiology mission.

In a release, ESA said that “as an intergovernmental organization mandated to develop and implement space programs in full respect with European values, we deeply deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the aggression towards Ukraine. While recognizing the impact on scientific exploration of space, ESA is fully aligned with the sanctions imposed on Russia by its member states.”

The decision to rethink the mission without the Russians involved came as Roscosmos has also moved to break space ties with ESA by withdrawing personnel from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana and putting all ESA missions scheduled for launch by Russian Soyuz rockets on hold.  In all, five Soyuz launches of missions — Galileo M10, Galileo M11, Euclid, Earthcare and one other — have been cancelled.

The ESA statement said that the agency has begun looking for potential alternative launch services for those  missions, too.

ESA has 22 European member nations and has worked frequently with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, as well as Roscosmos.

American and Russians astronauts, as well as those from Europe, Japan, Canada and elsewhere, have cooperated on the ISS now for decades. In this image from 2013 are Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield (right) from Canada, then clockwise NASA astronauts Tom Marshburn and Chris Cassidy, and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin, Roman Romanenko and Pavel Vinogradov.   Can the cooperation last?  (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center)

At the same time that the European-Russian space partnership has been put on hold and possibly cancelled, the cooperation between Russia and the NASA, ESA, the Japanese Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency has continued on the International Space Station.

There was earlier some doubt about Russian participation on the ISS after Roscosmos director general Dmitry Rogozin  threatened to pull out of the space station and allow it to fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled deorbit to protest of international sanctions on Russia for its Ukraine invasion.… Read more

Will The ISS Fall Victim to Russia’s Ukraine Invasion and Resulting Sanctions? Can The ExoMars Project Survive?

February 27, 2022 / / 1 Comment

NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have been cooperating (with other national agencies) on the International Space Station since development began in the early 1990s. . But the director of Roscosmos has said that cooperation could end abruptly due to mounting sanctions against Russia. (NASA)

The United States and Russia have cooperated extensively and well in building and operating the International Space Station since the plan was formalized in 1993.  The European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency have played major roles since the beginning, but it was first and foremost a U.S.-Russian venture.

That deep cooperation has been failing for some years but the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine and resulting Western sanctions may well put a final end of that.

Late last week, as Russia invaded Ukraine and Western nations responded with increasingly harsh sanctions, the director of Russia’s space agency chief sent out a harsh, sarcastic and threatening tweet about that ISS partnership.

After President Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. would sanction major Russian banks and impose export controls on Russia to curtail high-tech imports, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that the sanctions could “destroy our cooperation on the ISS.”

Not only that, he said that the current orbit and location of the ISS is under his nation’s control since Russian Progress spacecraft keep it from losing altitude.  He went on in a long tweet that threatened: “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled de-orbit and fall into the United States or Europe? There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect?”

“The ISS does not fly over Russia, therefore all the risks are yours.  Are you ready for them?”  Rogozin, a longtime Putin ally, has been at the helm of Roscosmos since May 2018 and was previously a deputy prime minister in charge of the Russian defense industry.

In a statement, NASA said that “The new export control measures will continue to allow U.S.-Russia civil space operation. No changes are planned to the agency’s support for ongoing in-orbit and ground-station operations.” 

There are four NASA astronauts, two Russian cosmonauts, and one European astronaut now aboard the ISS.

Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has warned that U.S. sanctions against the Russian space sector could have serious consequences for the International Space Station.

… Read more

A Significant Advance: Primitive Earth Life Survives an 18-Month Exposure to Mars-Like Conditions in Space

April 4, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The European Space Agency’s BIOMEX array, outside the Russian Zvezda module of the ISS. (ESA)

The question of whether simple life can survive in space is hardly new, but it has lately taken on a new urgency.

It is not only a pressing scientific question — might life from Mars or another body have seeded life on Earth?  Might organisms similar to extreme Earth life survive Mars-like conditions? — but it is also has some very practical implications.  If humans are going to some day land and live on the moon or on Mars, they will need to grow food to survive.

So the question is pretty basic:  can Earth seeds or dormant life survive a long journey to deep space and can they then  grow in the protected but still extreme radiation, temperature, and vacuum  of deep space?

It was with these questions in mind that the European Space Agency funded a proposal from the German Institute of Planetary Research to send samples of a broad range of simple to more complex life to the International Space Station in 2014, and to expose the samples to extreme conditions outside the station.

Some of the findings have been reported earlier,  but last month the full results of the Biomex tests (Biology on Mars Experiment) were unveiled in the journal Astrobiology.

And the answer is that many, though certainly not all, of the the samples of snow and permafrost algae, cyanobacteria, archaea, fungi, biofilms, moss and lichens in the  did survive their 533 days of living dangerous in their dormant states.  When brought back to Earth and returned to normal conditions, they returned to active life.

“For the majority of the chosen organisms, it was the first and the longest time they ever were exposed to space and Mars-like conditions,” Jean-Pierre Paul de Vera, principal investigator of the effort, wrote to me.  And the results were promising.

 

For the BIOMEX experiment, on 18 August 2014, Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev placed several hundred samples in an experiment container on the exterior of the Zvezda’Russian ISS module. The containers, open to the surrounding space environment, held primitive terrestrial organisms such as mosses, lichens, fungi, bacteria, archaea and algae, as well as cell membranes and pigments.

 

A microbiologist and planetary researcher at the German Space Agency’s Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, de Vera and his team went from Antarctica to the parched Atacama desert in Chile, from the high Alps to the steppe highlands of central Spain to find terrestrial life surviving in extreme conditions (extremophiles.)… Read more

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