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Russia confirms withdrawal from ISS in 2024, shows plans of new station

Russia confirms withdrawal from ISS in 2024, shows plans of new station

Russia's new space chief on Tuesday signalled his country's intent to withdraw from the International Space Station after 2024.

"As you know, we operate in international cooperation at the International Space Station. Without a doubt, we will fulfil all our obligations to our partners. But the decision to withdraw from the station after 2024 has been taken. I think that by this time we will start to form a Russian orbital station. - said Yury Borisov to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Roscosmos also posted an image of the proposed Russian space station which is planned to be called ROSS. 

General Designer of RSC Energia (the company that will make the elements of the future Russian station) said in an interview to Russian Space magazine that the first elements of the station won’t be launched earlier than 2028, though. 

Nasa and Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, have been in talks to extend Russia's participation on the space station to 2030, and the White House earlier this year approved NASA's plans to continue running the orbital laboratory until then.

Nasa has seen Russia as crucial to keeping the space station running, and agency officials are keen on keeping the partnership in place through 2030, officials have previously said.

A football field-sized orbital science laboratory some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, the station counts Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency as other key partners, though Russia and the U.S. are regarded as the outpost's core stakeholders -- Russian thrusters control the station's position in orbit, while an American power grid keeps the outpost running.

Earlier this month, Russia and the U.S. agreed to resume sharing astronaut flights to the space station, allowing cosmonauts to fly on American vehicles in exchange for American astronauts flying on Russia's Soyuz.

Russia confirms withdrawal from ISS in 2024, shows plans of new station

The U.S. State Department on Tuesday said it was taken by surprise by Russia's announcement that it plans to pull out of the International Space Station and called it an "unfortunate development."

State Department spokesperson Ned Price told a regular news briefing the news was an unfortunate development, given the critical scientific work performed at the ISS.

Prior to Price's remarks, Robyn Gatens, the director of the space station for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said her Russian counterparts have not communicated any such intent, as required by the intergovernmental agreement on the station.

The ISS arrangement between the United States and Russia is one of the last links of civil cooperation between the two countries as relations have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War over Russia began its war in Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The U.S. and Russian segments of the ISS, spanning the size of a football field were deliberately built to be intertwined and technically interdependent.

For example, while U.S. gyroscopes provide day-to-day control over ISS orientation in space and U.S. solar arrays augment power supplies to the Russian module, the Russian unit provides the propulsion used to keep the station in orbit.

"You can't have an amicable divorce," Garrett Reisman, a retired NASA astronaut and current astronautical engineering professor at the University of Southern California, told Reuters in an interview. "We're kind of stuck together."

But Reisman sees Russia's withdrawal from the ISS as an opportunity.

"I think they (NASA) were reluctant to go all out to ask for funding from Congress and to really do something publicly about trying to break this dependency on the Russians for the space station out of fear for angering the Russians for fear that they would rapidly pull out and leave us with nothing," he said. "It's not going to be easy or cheap to replace all the Russian capability with American capability in only two years. But I do think it's possible. I think it's something we should have been doing from the moment they crossed the border into Ukraine."

"The knee-jerk reaction, even after all the stuff started happening in Ukraine, was to try to defend the ISS and keep the partnership alive, because that's what we've been doing for so long and to some organizational inertia there," Reisman continued. "I think it's time to stop that, frankly." 

Former Russian space chief Rogozin had previously said that Russia could not agree to extend its ISS role beyond 2024 unless the United States lifts sanctions on two Russian companies blacklisted for suspected military ties. Putin removed Rogozin as space chief on July 15, replacing him with Borisov, a former deputy prime minister and deputy defence minister.

 

 

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