As joke videos go, it wasn’t very funny. Set to a bouncy Russian pop tune, the 57-second clip posted to Telegram on March 5 showed International Space Station cosmonauts hugging an American astronaut goodbye, climbing into the Russian segment of the ISS, undocking, and flying away, as Russian ground controllers gave a standing ovation.
What lent the ostensibly lighthearted clip a darker feel was the identity of the organization that made it—Roscosmos, Russia’s equivalent of NASA—and what the video implied would happen next. With the Russian portion of the station detached, the ISS would have no thrusters to maintain its orbit. The whole thing would be doomed to plunge to Earth. With a wink and a smile, Russia was suggesting it might kill the orbital outpost.
With the West imposing sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine, will Moscow retaliate by dooming the ISS? No one knows, but the possibility is real. “I think this is the biggest threat to the international partnership in its history,” says Ron Garan, a former NASA astronaut who spent five months aboard the station in 2011.
What’s at risk is the largest and most complex international project ever, a $100 billion testament to human ingenuity and cross-border cooperation. The 490-ton assemblage, which required more than 40 space launches to build, sprawls over an area bigger than a football field. It’s been inhabited continuously for 21 years, a record in manned spaceflight, and at any given time more than 100 scientific experiments are under way. And though it looks as fragile as a dragonfly, it’s weathered solar flares, micrometeoroid impacts, air leaks, and equipment malfunctions. At the end of December, the Biden administration announced it was extending funding for the ISS from 2024 to 2030.
All that nerd stuff, though, has always been window dressing for the ISS’s original purpose: keeping Russian scientists off the street. When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the world’s most advanced space-launch industries was suddenly adrift. Because the same technology that puts things in orbit can also be used to lob a nuke, the U.S. was keen to ensure all that talent and technology wouldn’t get scooped up by Iran, Libya, North Korea, or some other unfriendly power. The space station was an exciting project that would be big enough to absorb a lot of unemployed space engineers. (Incidentally, it would also necessitate lots of big contracts for U.S. aerospace contractors and give the cool-but-underused space shuttle a place to go.)
“We signed all the paperwork to admit them into the partnership right in the middle of basically civil war in Russia,” says Garan, referring to the constitutional crisis of 1993, during which Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered troops to shell the building that housed the legislature. “Tanks were literally firing outside of the buildings where NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin was signing the Russians into it. That partnership in space was so important that both sides were willing to risk life and limb for it.”
The idea that the ISS was an expression of an unbreakable partnership influenced its design. The U.S. and Russia weren’t just collaborating to build a shared property; each was contributing, and would subsequently control, a critical function. America would provide the electricity to run the station, generated by four sets of solar panels. The Russians would supply propulsion, both to boost it higher when the orbit decays and to shift its location to avoid space debris. “The station is not built to exist without the Russian module,” says Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a think tank in Washington.
The balance of the relationship changed in 2011, when the space shuttle program was terminated. With no way to get to the ISS on its own, the U.S. had to rent rides aboard Russian Soyuz rockets. That dependence left Americans with little leverage when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed armed separatist movements that seized parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. When the Obama administration introduced a slate of sanctions in response, including on Russia’s high-tech exports, Dmitry Rogozin, who was then deputy prime minister, fired off a pointed barb on Twitter: “After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest the U.S. delivers its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline.”
NASA’s efforts to replace the space shuttle turned out to be slower and more expensive than anticipated. Finally, in May 2020, a Crew Dragon capsule carrying two astronauts was launched to the ISS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. For the first time in nine years, the U.S. could get to the space station on its own.
By that time, Rogozin had been named general director of Roscosmos. His sense of decorum remained unchanged. After Russia invaded Ukraine and the West retaliated with sanctions, including on Rogozin himself, he told a state-owned TV network that Russia would stop selling rocket engines to the U.S. To get to the ISS, the Americans could “fly on their brooms.” After former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly criticized him on Twitter, Rogozin tweeted at Kelly: “Get off, you moron! Otherwise, the death of the #ISS will be on your conscience.”
The ISS isn’t the only space project roiled by the fallout from the invasion of Ukraine. Russia has pulled its workforce from the European Space Agency launch complex in French Guiana, and the ESA has suspended the joint ExoMars robot probe. To retaliate against the U.K. for its sanctions, Russia canceled the coming launch of 36 satellites for OneWeb, a satellite internet company based in London and partly owned by the British government. In response, OneWeb canceled its entire order book. “That sent a clear signal to all other countries and companies that you can’t rely on the Russians,” Harrison says. “Honestly, I think they have completely killed their international launch business.”
If Russia does decide to tip over the playing board and go home, it won’t be as simple as the Telegram clip suggested. “That video is propaganda,” says Ann Kapusta, a former American ISS ground controller who’s now executive director of the Space Frontier Foundation. “There are so many interconnections, so much wiring going back and forth, that you would have to do a bunch of spacewalks to actually disconnect the module.”
Russia’s simplest route to withdrawing from the ISS would be to just pull its crew off and refuse to provide propulsion anymore. In that case, the tiny amount of atmosphere present 250 miles above the Earth’s surface would suffice to gradually drag the space station into a lower and lower orbit, until eventually it would disintegrate in a fireball and crash. It would take 9 to 12 months for that to happen, Kapusta says.
If the countries reached a more amicable divorce agreement, Russia could take a payout and continue to support the ISS on an interim basis while the U.S. builds and installs replacements for Russian equipment. That kind of gradual exit might set the stage for one of the other ISS partners—the ESA, Canada, or Japan—to play an increased role, or for new spacefaring nations to join in. “There are a bunch of other potential free-nation partners who would love the opportunity to start working on this,” Kapusta says.
But would Russia really want to leave? For a country whose high-tech industries are under attack from international sanctions, the ISS stands out as an untarnished monument to its engineering prowess. “The space station is one of the main points of pride of Russia when it comes to space,” Harrison says. “I mean, they don’t have a lot else to point to.”
For now, Rogozin is maintaining a tough stance. Appearing at a March 27 event commemorating the death of Russia’s first cosmonaut, Rogozin indicated that if Western powers didn’t lift some of their sanctions, Roscosmos might soon announce a withdrawal from the ISS. “March 31 is the last day when we are waiting for a response from NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency regarding the fact that they must withdraw sanctions,” Rogozin said, according to Russian state news agency TASS, adding that in the absence of a timely response, Russia would determine on its own “how long the ISS will operate.”
So far, Russia has been keeping to the previously agreed-upon schedule of astronaut launches and returns. On March 18 a Soyuz rocket took off as scheduled from the Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan and ferried three Russian cosmonauts to the ISS. There are now five Russians, four Americans, and a German on board.
On March 30 one of the Americans—Mark Vande Hei—is scheduled to climb into a Soyuz capsule with two Russians and descend to Kazakhstan. Whether he’s the last to do so will depend on what Rogozin and his colleagues decide to do the following day.
Some think a Russian pullout would be good riddance. “From a responsible perspective, we shouldn’t want to work with somebody who is acting this way on Earth,” Kapusta says. “I think it’s our responsibility to say, ‘We’re not going to have that in space, we don’t want to work with you anymore.’ There are ways that we can move forward without them.”
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