ISS Faces Existential Test as Ukraine Crisis Threatens Russia-West Space Cooperation

The International Space Station orbits Earth at four hundred kilometers up, a structure the size of a football field and weighing more than four hundred tonnes. It has been continuously inhabited since the year 2000. It is also, right now, caught between two worlds—the one where nations cooperate in the vacuum of space, and the one where they wage war on the ground.

In early March 2022, as Russian forces moved into Ukraine, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, took to Twitter with a warning. If Russia withdrew its support from the station, he said, the consequences would be catastrophic. The ISS would fall uncontrollably from orbit and crash over populated areas—China, India, or elsewhere. It was a threat wrapped in physics, and the physics was real. The station does not simply hang in space. It orbits through the thin upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, which exerts a constant drag, slowly pulling it downward. To keep it aloft, Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft have visited regularly for decades, using their thrusters to give the station periodic boosts. Without those interventions, the orbit would degrade. It would take years, but eventually the station would fall.

Rogozin also announced that Russia would no longer cooperate with Germany on joint experiments aboard the Russian section of the station. The message was unmistakable: the Ukraine crisis was reaching into orbit.

Yet on Monday of that same week, Kathy Lueders, who heads NASA's human spaceflight program, told reporters something different. The station was operating normally, she said. At the working level—among the engineers and scientists who actually run the program—there were no indications that Russian counterparts had abandoned their commitment. The two narratives hung in the air, unresolved.

The threat, however, was not entirely hollow. The ISS exists because of a partnership that began in 1975, when American astronaut Tom Stafford shook hands with Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov through a docking module, their spacecraft connected in orbit. That handshake marked the symbolic end of the Cold War space race and the beginning of something new. Two decades later, as the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States faced budget pressures, both nations found themselves needing each other. A 1993 agreement launched what would become the International Space Station—a collaboration that eventually drew in Canada, Europe, Japan, and thirteen other nations. The first module launched in 1998. By the time the station reached its current configuration, it had become a working monument to what international cooperation could achieve: a laboratory that had hosted nearly three thousand research investigations by scientists from more than a hundred countries, continuously staffed by astronauts and cosmonauts from nineteen nations.

This was not the first time geopolitical crisis had threatened the partnership. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and sanctions followed, there was real fear that the relationship would shatter. At that moment, American space shuttles had been retired, and the U.S. had no independent way to reach the station—only Russian Soyuz spacecraft could carry American astronauts to orbit. Rogozin had mocked the situation then, suggesting Americans would need a trampoline to get there. But the program survived. Despite the tensions, the cooperation continued without interruption.

Now, in 2022, alternatives existed that had not existed in 2014. SpaceX had hinted it could take on the task of boosting the station. The Cygnus supply ship, built by Orbital Sciences Corporation and flying to the station since 2014, had tested its powerful thrusters and demonstrated they could provide the necessary orbital boost. These options meant that Russia's leverage, while still real, was no longer absolute.

Still, those who worked in space exploration held out hope that alternatives would not be necessary. The station was scheduled to operate until around 2030, when it would be intentionally decommissioned and brought down. Lueders spoke for many in the space business when she said it would be a sad day if the nations could not continue to peacefully operate together in space. From orbit, after all, there are no borders. Astronauts and cosmonauts looking down see only a planet without the arbitrary lines that divide it on maps below. That perspective, hard-won over nearly five decades, now hung in the balance.