As shared by NASA Watch on Saturday (March 5), the video from Russian state news agency RIA Novosti shows NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei staying behind on the ISS instead of departing on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft as planned.
Matters are made worse by recent comments by Dmitry Rogozin, director general of the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos, space.com reports. Rogozin has posted several fiery tweets lately about the state of cooperation on the ISS following the imposition of numerous international sanctions against Russia over the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Rogozin also said in an interview with Russian television on February 26 that "professionals working in the space industry are very worried [ABOUT THE SANCTIONS] and don't know where this will go next," according to a machine translation of his comments.
Some media sources interpret this video and Rogozin's comments to mean that Roscosmos may be planning to leave Vande Hei behind or do something similarly irresponsible on the ISS. However, this concern seems overblown at the moment, given that NASA has stressed that cooperation on the ISS is continuing as normal.
Rogozin himself recently stated that Vande Hei will return home as planned, dismissing as "hysterical" stories suggesting otherwise.
Vande Hei is on track to break the American record for the longest consecutive stay in space, currently held by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days in the sky in 2015 and 2016. Vande Hei is scheduled to depart the ISS in a Soyuz on March 30 along with two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Petr Dubrov, and land with them in Kazakhstan.
Although NASA is seeking "operational flexibility" in dealing with Roscosmos, the US agency still expects Vande Hei to descend as planned and then return to Houston through normal procedures, NASA's deputy administrator for space operations Kathy Lunders stressed late last month.
Officials "are preparing for Mark's return, and all the normal procedures are in place for us to be able to do that," Kathy Lunders said during a Feb. 28 press conference about an unrelated private mission called Axiom-1, which is set to launch to the ISS shortly after Vande Hei's departure.
When Vande Hei descends to Earth, a team of NASA personnel and physicians (flown in from the United States) will be ready to assist in his long transport back to Houston. There, Vande Hei will be debriefed and begin his medical recovery journey, which will take months as he has been exposed to the microgravity environment since April 2021.
NASA prepares for response to Russian retaliation
That said, NASA is already building backups for key space station operations. For example, an already docked Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft is expected to perform the first operational ISS reentry by a United States spacecraft.
The reentries, a traditional Russian responsibility performed using a Progress cargo spacecraft, are performed periodically to ensure that the orbiting complex does not drift out of Earth's atmosphere. But Cygnus may be able to do this job on its own, and SpaceX has offered to provide this service as well.
The Russian and American sides of the space station are deeply intertwined; Russia provides the propulsion for the entire complex, while the Americans generate the electricity, for example. And recent, deteriorating relations in other Russian-involved space programs have prompted Rogozin to send several blustery messages on Twitter.
Rogozin, and today, Saturday, said sanctions could cause the International Space Station to fall.
Source: Ethnos
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