Space, the war's final frontier?

US astronaut Mark Vande Hei has become a pawn in a major intergalactic battle where rules of engagement are complex and political. Samuel Fishwick on the race for peace in the cosmos.

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FOUR hundred kilometres above our heads, a safe space debate is raging. Putin’s bru-tal 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.