Russia to Quit International Space Station Partnership

Russia’s new space chief has announced plans to withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS) partnership after 2024.

The announcement by Roscosmos Director General Yury Borisov heralds the end of Russia’s decades-long partnership with NASA to keep ISS fully operational.

Per CNN:

Roscosmos chief Yury Borisov told Russian President Vladimir Putin that “the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made.”

“You know that we are working within the framework of international cooperation at the International Space Station. Undoubtedly, we will fulfil all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave the station after 2024 has been made,” Borisov told Putin in the Kremlin-issued readout.

However, a senior NASA official told Reuters that the Kremlin hasn’t officially spoken to Washington about the future of its orbital arrangement.

The Verge has more on the somewhat ambiguous remarks:

Even now, it’s unclear exactly how this decision has been communicated to the United States. NASA did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment, but senior NASA officials at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference (ISSRDC) in Washington, DC, on Tuesday said they had not received any communication from Roscosmos. “We haven’t received any official word from the partner,” Robyn Gatens, the director of the International Space Station at NASA, said during a panel at the conference. She noted that NASA would be talking more about the plan moving forward.

NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, speaking from space during the conference, said they had just heard the news this morning from news reports.

According to experts, NASA can run ISS without Russia — but doing so will take time, money and effort, as Newsweek reported in March:

Space cooperation between Russia and the U.S. has been thrown into question in recent days as tensions rise between the two countries over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In response, the U.S. announced sanctions that President Joe Biden said would have an effect on Russia’s space industry, stoking the ire of Dmitry Rogozin, director of Roscosmos.

In a series of Twitter posts last week, Rogozin suggested that blocking cooperation with Russia in space could lead to an uncontrolled deorbit of the ISS which has operated continuously in space for more than two decades. He later stated that Roscosmos would “focus on achieving full import independence in matters of space instrumentation.”

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Russia and the U.S. are the two largest contributors to the ISS’s operations, with both countries operating their own sections. Notably, it is Russian technology that is responsible for maintaining the station’s orbit.

Russia will instead focus on building its own space station beginning in 2025:

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