Four hundred kilometres above our heads, a safe space debate is raging.
Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has threatened to bring the International Space Station, the zenith of US-Russia cooperation since 1993, crashing back to Earth. “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and a fall on the United States or Europe?”, ranted Dmitri Rogozin, director of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, after US sanctions hit Russia’s rocket programme.
Days later, Roscosmos, which has supplied the only means of reaching the station since the US’s space shuttle programme ended in 2011, threatened to strand US astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the station, mocking up a video of their Soyuz MS-21 space craft leaving the 55-year-old father-of-two in space. “It’s a terrible threat,” Vande Hei’s 77-year-old mother Mary said. “We are just doing a lot of praying.”
What happens next? Russia can’t “crank a lever” and collapse the station, but Rogozin’s threats aren’t empty. The ISS is always being tugged back to Earth by the pull of the planet’s gravity. Russia’s Soyuz space capsules routinely nudge it upwards by docking and firing their thrusters. Nasa supplies electricity to the entire station. “They have the propulsion system, we have the power,” says Professor Scott Pace, former executive director of the US Space Council and a space policy lecturer at George Washington University.
Nasa administrator Bill Nelson played down Rogozin’s comments, telling The Associated Press: “That’s just Dmitry Rogozin. He spouts off every now and then. But at the end of the day, he’s worked with us.” In fact, a Russian spaceship gave the station its latest gentle boost after Rogozin’s menacing warnings.
Vande Hei, currently lodged on the ISS with five Russian cosmonauts, three other astronauts and a German, is scheduled to return to Russia-supporting Kazakhstan at the end of the month after 355 days in orbit. Could anything be done to rescue him? “There is a 1968 treaty called the Rescue Agreement,” says Professor Dr Frans von der Dunk, a bona fide space lawyer. “If an astronaut is in distress, all states able to do something about it must do something about it.”
It was meant to stop the Cold War superpowers capturing astronauts when they fell back to Earth, but it could be invoked to send nations like Japan, India or South Africa to rummage in the space garage. Most likely, Elon Musk’s SpaceX would provide some muscle and ingenuity, rejigging one of its Dragon pods to dock with the ISS, like a battleship receiving a mayday from a fishing trawler.
If Nasa told me to leave a crewmate, I’d fight them tooth and nail
The United Nations, meanwhile, could call on Putin to answer for his space transgressions — breaking memorandums of understanding to ferry astronauts up and down safely — at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Astronauts have special legal status, defined as “envoys of mankind”, says Professor von der Dunk. “The idea was that they risked their life for all humanity, so they’re not supposed to be treated like normal citizens, which includes the concept that they’re not supposed to be taken hostage.” But Putin has such disregard for all international law that “if he saw a political opportunity, he’d be happy to say he’s a combatant and the US is at war with us”, says Professor von der Dunk. That Kazakhstan landing might be a bumpy one.
But politics is for planet Earth — in space, it’s all about the rule of the crew. Astronauts would “never leave a man behind”, says Clayton Anderson, a retired US astronaut who spent 152 days on the ISS in 2017. “If Nasa told me to leave a crewmate, I’d fight them tooth and nail,” he tells me. Anderson shared the ISS with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov, “open, gregarious and funny”, and Fyodor Yurchikhin, “wry, a real smoothie”. “They are my space family,” says Anderson. “We became brothers. The Russian media called us ‘three musketeers in orbit’. You depend on each other to survive.”
A different psychology applies. “The space community has similarities to sea faring communities,” says Professor Pace. “The ocean is hostile enough as it is. You don’t want to go out of your way to make it more hostile. You want to survive.” Anderson says astronauts don’t like disunity. “It’s disappointing to me that my country said it would sanction Russia’s space programme. All those countries participating and keeping each other alive in space and doing great things — that’s important for the world to see.”
“Is there a lot of heat? Yes,” says Pace. “The station is not invulnerable. But it would be about the last thing to go in a war, because it’s in everyone’s interest to keep it going. It would be disappointing if the Russians pulled out early, because frankly one of two toilets is in the Russian section, so you don’t want to lose half your bath also.”
The station is not invulnerable. But it would be about the last thing to go in a war
The ISS needs at least two astronauts on board to keep it going. Sleep is tricky. “You hear every sound,” says Anderson. And Russia’s cosmonauts have performed great feats of international cooperation, he notes. “One day Oleg came floating into the lab module and he looked at me and says, ‘Clay, the toilet isn’t working.’ Then he said, ‘Don’t eat.’ And I thought, damn, Oleg, I just had a big lunch. Long story short, I was able to use the Soyuz toilet.”
If Vande Hei is kept up in space he’ll have enough food, water and oxygen for months. But other pressures will tell. His parents would be one worry. “That’s anxiety, that’s real fear,” says Anderson. “Those are the real emotions that steely eyed astronauts aren’t supposed to deal with. But we do. One of the things I most looked forward to was holding my mum’s hand again, and being able to tell her I loved her.” She died of lung cancer three weeks after he returned to Earth. “So imagine me being up there, and this Ukrainian craziness, and my mother has lung cancer and I’m going to be stuck up there for two more months.”
Above all, space farers like to fix things, not break them. Which is why Professor Pace thinks that a solution will be found.
“Remember what they say in the movie The Martian?”, he says. “You solve problem after problem after problem, and if you solve enough problems you get to come home.”
