United States, Russia tussle goes to space

London: In the tug-of-war between Russia and the US over the Ukraine issue, the International Space Station is now becoming the rope.

According to The Independent, the dispute began when a Nasa memo, leaked in April, revealed that the space agency would be suspending all contacts with Russia because of the country’s “ongoing violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty”.

Although the involvement of the US government was not explicit, Nasa’s decision was widely assumed to have involved the White House and State Department. Moreover, the subsequent export restrictions confirmed the US’s intent to punish Russia’s struggling space industry.

However, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, still remains king in the area of transport as after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, the US has been entirely reliant on Russian rockets — specifically Soyuz rockets — to get its astronauts to and from the space station.

Last week, Russia’s Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin had said that Moscow is “very concerned about continuing to develop hi-tech projects with such an unreliable partner as the US”, and that Russia would reject US plans to use the ISS beyond the station’s “retirement” in 2020.

However, he later softened Moscow’s stance slightly, saying that Russia would “act very pragmatically and not put obstacles in the way of work on the ISS”. But, for  US, the incident has highlighted the dependency of its current aerospace programmes.

James Oberg, author of a book about the two countries’ joint history in space, said that the latest exchange of words marked the end of their “partnership of reluctant co-dependence”.