U.S.-Russia ties in space face change
New commercial flight could test cooperation
A scorched Dragon capsule swooped from the heavens on Aug. 2 to restore America’s prominence in human spaceflight. Tucked safely inside were two NASA astronauts and one giant piece of baggage for the U.S.-Russia relationship:
Both countries now have a ride to the International Space Station.
This station has housed Americans and Russians, living and working side by side, for nearly two decades. But for the past nine years, Russia alone could fly people there. Its pride and budget were bolstered by the U.S. purchasing rides into space.
No longer. As the U.S. resumes launching astronauts from its own soil — an ability it does not wish to lose again — policy experts are watching to see if this
affects the countries’ relationship.
Through their civil space programs, Americans and Russians have sidestepped election meddling and economic sanctions to cooperate. This relationship has helped bridge the two cultures, with astronauts learning Russian and cosmonauts visiting their counterparts’ homes in Houston.
“If you take that away or reduce that cooperation, it’s just one less restraint on further tensions,” said Gregory Miller, an associate professor at the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.
To be clear, Miller does not think the U.S. launching astronauts will start a war.
NASA said it’s in “active discussions” to fly cosmonauts on U.S. spacecraft owned by SpaceX (and later Boeing) and to continue flying astronauts on Russian spacecraft.
“I’m hopeful there are opportunities for NASA and Roscosmos to expand our collaboration farther into the solar system, including the moon,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.
But Victoria Samson, a space policy expert at the Secure World Foundation, said the introduction of commercial companies makes Russia uncomfortable. And with NASA no longer buying seats on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, its Roscosmos space agency loses an important source of funding.
For now, Russia and the U.S. remain interdependent on the International Space Station. But this station will eventually get retired — it’s set to operate through 2024, though that will likely be extended — leaving a question as to what U.S.-Russian relations will look like once astronauts and cosmonauts no longer share a home some 250 miles above Earth.
Large personalities
The SpaceX Crew Dragon didn’t just revive U.S. human spaceflight. It introduced a new partner: SpaceX founder Elon Musk, an outspoken billionaire eager to show that commercial entities can carry people into space.
On May 30, the day SpaceX launched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, Musk couldn’t help but take a jab at Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos.
“The trampoline is working,” he said.
It was a punchline six years in the making: Rogozin, upset about U.S. sanctions in 2014, suggested that Americans use a trampoline to reach the space station.
Musk called his comment an inside joke, and Rogozin initially said he loved it.
But a few days later, he released a lengthy op-ed in which he criticized the space shuttle program (its 2011 retirement began U.S. dependence on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft) for its “immense costliness and unforgivable failure rate.”
And he did not appreciate the humor.
“When our partners finally managed to carry out a successful test of their spacecraft, we didn’t get anything but jokes and mockery,” Rogozin said, adding that an expression of gratitude to Russia would have been more appropriate.
Roscosmos did not respond to email requests for comment.
SpaceX, with its ability to replace the Soyuz, makes Russia uncomfortable because it threatens a pillar of Russia’s culture and identity, said Pavel Luzin, who lives in Perm, Russia, has a doctorate in international relations and has studied space policy since 2008.
He said the space program is a yardstick Russians use to judge the country — if it’s doing well, they view the government more favorably.
A long, complicated history
Russia has long been opposed to a commercial space sector; a sentiment first voiced by the former Soviet Union when drafting the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that provided a framework for governing the exploration and use of space.
The Soviet Union allowed for a compromise in the treaty: Governments would be responsible for overseeing any nongovernment entities.
The relationship slowly moved from competitive to cooperative
— cosmonauts and astronauts shook hands in space in 1975 — but had its ups and downs. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, former President George H.W. Bush was looking for new ways to collaborate.
“Space was an obvious area,” said John Logsdon, a retired professor and founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “And in particular, the Russians needed money.”
The U.S. didn’t want Russia selling its technology or having its rocket workforce moving to Iran or North Korea, Logsdon said, so America began allowing commercial satellites to launch on Russian rockets.
And then Russia proposed merging its plans for a next-generation space station with America’s plans for Space Station Freedom.
“The Russians’ involvement in the program was a major factor in order to be successful in the International Space Station,” said George W.S. Abbey, senior fellow in space policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and a former director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Also important was the country’s tried-and-true Soyuz rocket and spacecraft.
Today’s Soyuz-2 rocket can directly trace its lineage to the rocket that launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, said Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at Bryce Space and Technology.
The R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile has been the basis for 25 variants of the Soyuz rocket that have launched more than 1,900 times.
“It’s a workhorse,” Smith said. “It’s one of the most successful rockets ever built.”
There is no equivalent track record in America, he said.
Future relations
It’s the future priorities of Russia’s civil space program that are being questioned. Russia says it’s building a vehicle to replace the Soyuz spacecraft that has had some 170 successful flights, as well as additional modules for the International Space Station, but both projects are underfunded and behind schedule.
Luzin said Russia’s focus on maintaining access to the International Space Station without enough emphasis on a long-term strategy for space exploration has weakened its position and left it with little to offer in a partnership.
“It was unable to use these years for developing its own manned spacecraft and launch vehicle for replacement of the old-fashioned Soyuz,” he said.
Its lesser budget doesn’t help, either. Luzin said Russia’s space budget was roughly $3.2 billion last year.
For comparison, NASA’s budget was $21.5 billion in fiscal year 2019 and is more than $22.6 billion for the current fiscal year.
In the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020, NASA paid nearly $86 million for each astronaut launched into space. The agency will pay $90.3 million to launch Kate Rubins in October.
“The American payments were highly important for Russia’s space industry and for Russia’s civil space program,” Luzin said.
Samson said U.S.-Russia cooperation doesn’t have to be in human spaceflight. The countries could partner on science missions, or they could share information for tracking satellites and space debris.
Ultimately, the money NASA saves by flying with commercial companies could be put toward its Artemis program seeking to return humans to the moon. Houston, the home of human spaceflight, would certainly benefit from this, said Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership.
“It potentially equates to additional people working,” he said.
Miller suggested the U.S. use the money it’s saving to help subsidize another country’s space program.
He said providing funding for another country, for instance the United Arab Emirates, to fly on the Soyuz would help keep Russia’s space program funded, preventing its knowledge and technology from being sold to more adversarial countries, while developing U.S. ties with a new international space partner.
“We don’t want to sever ties in space or do anything that might reduce cooperation when there is this other competitor, for lack of a better term,” he said.
That other competitor is China. In June, the Department of Defense said China and Russia “present the most immediate and serious threats to U.S. space operations” as they develop counterspace capabilities — which may disrupt, degrade or destroy space systems — and have military doctrines that view space as important to modern warfare.
Samson said she doesn’t think Russia and China will get too cozy as partners in space. Like the U.S. and Russia, the two countries have their own complicated relationship. Rather, she said, China’s rise in space capabilities means there are more players that make the U.S. uneasy (in space and elsewhere) that America now has to monitor and manage relationships with in space.
“The biggest thing that’s changed since the Cold War is that this is no longer a bilateral conversation,” Samson said. “It’s multilateral.”
“When our partners finally managed to carry out a successful test of their spacecraft, we didn’t get anything but jokes and mockery.” Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos