Still a symbol of peaceful cooperation: The International Space Station with the space shuttle, taken from the Russian Soyuz TMA 21 spacecraft
Image: dapd
Space travel and astronomy are often presented as activities that help transcend national borders. The war in Ukraine is now calling this narrative into question.
An last Wednesday one could feel transported back to the time before the war. “Welcome back, Mark!” was the message on the screen of the control center of the Russian space agency Roskosmos in Korolev near Moscow. This was how the American astronaut Mark Vande Hei was welcomed, who after 355 days in space had landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan together with his two Russian colleagues Anton Shkaplerov and Pjotr Dubrow.
The return of the Soyuz MS-19 crew, which would not have drawn undue attention a month and a half ago, had been followed with some trepidation around the world — after all, Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian Space Agency, had taken the sanctions against Russia as an opportunity, from the very beginning March to aggressively polemicize against the United States. He threatened the International Space Station (ISS) to crash over western countries — which has so far been dependent on regular course corrections by the Russian part of the station — and underlined this scenario with a disturbing fake video in which the Russian cosmonauts their colleague Vande Hei im leave the American part of the ISS behind before it, decoupled from the Russian module, falls without propulsion into the unknown.
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