 "Russia says will 'quit International Space Station after 2024' days after US announced resumption of joint flights")
New Delhi: Russia has decided to quit the International Space Station “after 2024”, the newly-appointed chief of Moscow’s space agency told President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
The announcement comes as tensions rage between the Kremlin and the West over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and several rounds of unprecedented sanctions against Moscow.
Russia and the United States have worked side by side on the ISS.
“Of course, we will fulfil all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made,” Yury Borisov, who was appointed Roscosmos chief in mid-July, told Putin.
“I think that by this time we will start putting together a Russian orbital station,” Borisov added, calling it the space programme’s main “priority”.
“Good,” Putin replied in comments released by the Kremlin.
Until now space exploration was one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the United States and its allies had not been wrecked by tensions over Ukraine and elsewhere.
Borisov said the space industry was in a “difficult situation”.
He said he would seek “to raise the bar, and first of all, to provide the Russian economy with the necessary space services”, pointing to navigation, communication, and data transmission, among other things.
Sending the first man into space in 1961 and launching the first satellite four years earlier are among key accomplishments of the Soviet space programme and remain a major source of national pride in Russia.
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View AllBut experts say the Russian space agency remains a shadow of its former self and has in recent years suffered a series of setbacks including corruption scandals and the loss of a number of satellites and other spacecraft.
Borisov, a former deputy prime minister with a military background, has replaced Dmitry Rogozin, a firebrand nationalist politician known for his bombastic statements and eccentric behaviour.
US: No official word from Russia yet
Meanwhile, the United States hasn’t received “any official word” from Russia on its just-announced plans to quit the International Space Station “after 2024,” a senior NASA official said following the announcement.
“We haven’t received any official word from the partner as to the news today,” director of the ISS for NASA, Robyn Gatens, said during a conference on the outpost.
NASA itself plans to retire the ISS after 2030 as it transitions to working with commercial space stations, and Gatens suggested Russia might be thinking about its own transition.
Asked whether she wanted the US-Russia space relationship to end, she replied: “No, absolutely not.”
Earlier this month, the United States said it would resume flights to the International Space Station with Russia, despite its attempts to isolate Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine.
Notably, the announcement came hours after Rogozin was "relieved of his duties."
ISS- a symbol of post-Cold War cooperation between US & Russia
Launched in 1998, the ISS is an international collaboration between five partners: US, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency.
The space station is divided into two sections — the Russian Orbital Section and US Orbital Segment. While the US looks after docks for spacecraft, Russia is tasked with keeping the ISS aloft using propulsion engines.
US space agency NASA had convinced its government for ventures with Russia in 1993 — two years after the Cold War, as well as the Space Race, ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The aim was to use Russian expertise and to make up for NASA’s funding cut.
US space venture’s dependence on Russia increased in the years that followed.
According to the website Space, since the decommissioning of NASA’s space shuttle in 2011, all the US space flights till 2020 have been carried out using the Russian spacecraft Soyuz.
In 2020, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully carry out a manned mission to the ISS.
With inputs from AFP
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