Part 1 of 2 Parts
Vladimir Putin is the President of Russia. He has demonstrated that he wants to wage a perpetual ideological, economic, and physical war against Western nations, especially, the United States. It may be time for the U.S. Congress to take action to halt U.S. and Russian space station cooperation. This may involve deorbiting the International Space Station (ISS) to crash into the Pacific Ocean. Such an action may not be desirable but then all out war is hardly desirable.
The U.S. should not continue to collaborate in space exploration with the current Russian regime of Putin. Continued space collaboration with Russia is an obvious threat to U.S. national security and the security of our allies. Rising international political tensions are a risk to the safety of our space station astronauts.
NASA is one of the few U.S. government agencies that is still deeply involved with the Russian government. NASA has suffered from decades of reversals and failures in executive and legislative branch policies. These have led to NASA being trapped in a quagmire of critical technical dependencies on the Russians that make maintaining and operating the ISS virtually impossible without continuing Russian support.
During the Clinton era, NASA was directed to use its soft power influence to keep Russian rocket scientists gainfully employed through cash reimbursements for Russian work on the ISS. The Clinton policy was meant to prevent Russian rocket scientists from fleeing the collapsed Soviet Union to possibly work for rogue nations who want to construct intercontinental and space-accessible missiles. NASA began subsidizing Roscosmos, the Russian version of NASA, in 1993 with an initial cash infusion of four hundred million dollars. It is far past time to shut down this pipeline of space funding.
NASA claims that it is studying how to commercialize the ISS. It believes that someday, U.S. companies will rake in cash from a profitable space station. Those companies would be responsible for dealing with the Russian space industry. Many analysts think that this is an unrealistic policy fantasy within the thinking of NASA’s current 1980s-era astronaut administrators.
NASA has been very successful in helping to launch a new domestic commercial rocket industry. This industry includes such companies as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Sierra Space, Virgin Galactic, etc. However, NASA will never be able to make the ISS commercially viable.
Even with more than one hundred billion dollars in investment, the ISS will never become a for-profit space laboratory. The extreme operational costs of the ISS keep rising every year. NASA’s budget for the ISS is currently just over three billion dollars a year. In the meantime, for-profit or not, the ISS is and always will be dependent on Russian operational cooperation on the ISS.
As Russia embraces Putin’s expansionist policies, the West must now expect more desperate acts of Russian aggression throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. Under the looming threat of civil war, Putin cannot afford to back down from his plans to send Russian mercenaries and troops across the former Soviet republics that once provided the bread and butter to his economically and politically bankrupt nation.
Please read Part 2 next