Is there a point at which the U.S. would cease to collaborate with Russia concerning the space station? I don’t want this thread to be overtly political, but politics is the elephant in the room. If the U.S. believes that Russia is interferring in our elections, and that Russia is assasinating former spies in our NATO allied countries, and sanctions have been passed against Russia by congress, is it not a little weird to cooperate with Russia in space? At what point would the U.S. call off this cooperation?
Tensions were a lot worse between our two nations at the time of the Apollo/Soyuz collaboration.
And I’m not seeing how this is really a factual question.
I thought the “is there a point at which…” factor made it factual. I’m not debating anything, so that’s why I put this in this forum.
Sure, if Russia started WWIII we can be confident that cooperation in space would stop. But short of that, nobody can possibly know where the line would be drawn for what the most minimal action would be to stop cooperation. That is why it isn’t a factual question.
It’s like asking, what would drive someone to a life of crime? Sure, one can imagine that everyone has their breaking point, but there’s no way to define that breaking point.
Since the OP is asking for opinions, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
”President Trump’s newly released 2019 budget proposal seeks to end U.S. government funding for the International Space Station (ISS) by 2025. Given that NASA expects first Space Launch System flight to slip into 2020 (and I’ll be a little surprised if we actually make that date), and the maximum flight rate for SLS is projected to be one mission per year, maintaining the ISS is probably a non-starter anyway without Russian cooperation and Soyuz flights which are only currently contracted out to 2019.
I’m not sure how sad I am to see it go; while we certainly invested the bulk of the money and effort in constructing the ISS, the scientific yield has been thin and in terms of human spaceflight has largely reinforced the existing thinking in space physiology that long duration interplanetary missions are going to require a substantially more terrestrial environment than current technology allows (simulated gravity, protection from cosmic as well as solar particle radiation). However, the plan to use the budget to support a return to the Moon does not seem to have any rationale or ultimate purpose.
As for cooperation, it is true that the Apollo-Soyuz project occurred during the Cold War, but it was in the mid-‘Seventies at a time of detente. If someone had suggested circa 1983 that we have a joint USA/CCCP mission it would have been regarded as a notional farce. We are currently at a state of not-quite-war-yet-not-peace with the Russian Federation, where we are deporting diplomats and accusing, with merit, Russia of engaging in active covert assassination on the soil of allies.
Stranger