Thursday, July 28, 2022

Space Force 2024: All Suited Up But With No Place Left To Go...,

MoA  |  Russia to withdraw from International Space Station after 2024

Russia has said it will withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS) after 2024 to focus on building its own orbital outpost.

Yuri Borisov, who was appointed to lead the state-controlled space corporation Roscosmos earlier this month, said during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia would fulfil its obligations to other partners before it leaves the project.

Mr Borisov said "the decision to leave the station after 2024 has been made."

The U.S. had planned to operate the station until 2031:

Earlier this year NASA published plans for the ISS which could see the 444,615kg structure taken out of orbit in January 2031 and crashed into a "spacecraft cemetery".

It said the laboratory would continue operating until 2030 but its long-term future is unsustainable.

The end date will now likely be earlier than NASA had planned. As an earlier report explained:

Russia provides the propellant and thrusters needed to periodically reboost the station, a critical capability NASA cannot currently replace. Maneuvering is provided by thrusters built into the Russian Zarya and Zvezda modules and aboard visiting Progress supply ships.

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ship that arrived earlier this week is the first U.S. vehicle after the space shuttle to be capable of reboost, but it cannot on its own replace the Russian capability.
...
NASA astronauts are not trained to operate Russian systems and vice versa for the cosmonauts. Neither side can safely operate the lab on its own.

Without the Russians thruster modules the station will continuously slow down and sink towards earth until it breaks up and burns in the atmosphere.

For the U.S. to build its own thruster modules would very likely take more than two years. They would probably arrive too late to rescue the station.

Russia has plans to build a new space station. An alternative for it may be to hook up with the Chinese space station which was launched last year. Yesterday it received its second large module, a laboratory. A third large module will be added later this year.

China build its own space station because the U.S. had excluded it from participating in the ISS:

China has been barred from the ISS since 2011, when Congress passed a law prohibiting official American contact with the Chinese space program due to concerns about national security. “National security,” of course, is the lingua franca excuse for any country to do anything it jolly well wants to do even if it has nothing to do with, you know, the security of the nation. But never mind.

Just 11 years after the ban China has launched and operates its own space station.

It is likely that from 2025 on there will again be only one international space station. But it will be operated by China and probably Russia while the U.S. and its allies will likely be excluded from it.

This is the consequence of the U.S. hostile behavior which excludes and sanctions others for unserious reason.

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