Politics in Space

(Photo from NASA)

Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, someone asked me about the implications for the International Space Station.

When I worked at the Johnson Space Center, my first few years were spent working in the Electronic Systems Test Laboratory. Many ESTL equipment racks were labeled in both English and Russian. In 1975, in the depths of the Cold War, the USA and USSR began flying joint missions into low Earth orbit. That required extensive collaboration.

Most people realize docking rings had to become standardized so spacecraft from the two countries could join together. Most people don’t think about the myriad other details that had to be made compatible, such as communication frequencies and protocols. On Star Trek, you see the comms officer scan frequencies, but finding the right frequency hasn’t been enough for decades. By the time STS (the Space Shuttle) began to fly, we weren’t doing analog radio any more. We were putting digital data onto the radio waves. To receive that data, you have to know what protocol was used to encode the data so you can decode it. Think about how most European and American mobile phones used to be unable to work if you took them across the Atlantic. That’s because for several years the USA and Europe used incompatible protocols for putting data onto a signal. If you had the right frequency but the wrong encoding protocol, you were out of luck.

American and Soviet space programs knew they couldn’t work together if politics intruded. Collaboration had to be rigorously professional, apolitical and unemotional to have any chance of success, so it was. On one occasion a Soviet engineer tried to defect when it was time for him to leave JSC. The USA returned him to the USSR in order to avoid an international incident and avoid politicizing the space programs. That happened years before I was there. People remembered vividly. It broke their hearts.

That’s what I expected to happen now, despite what Russia is doing in Ukraine and what the USA and European Union are doing to participate in international responses to it. (The European Space Agency is also involved in ISS.)

It looks like I was wrong.

Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin said Russia will stop providing rocket engines to the USA and NASA will have to “soar into space on their broomsticks”. Elon Musk shot back that if Russia won’t fly to the ISS, SpaceX will fill the gap. Rogozin also threatened to crash the ISS into the USA.

The invasion became more and more appalling. People focused on that and not on the ISS.

Then a Russian Soyuz capsule arrived at ISS Friday with the only all-Russian crew complement that has been sent to the station. The cosmonauts launched wearing ordinary flight suits. They arrived wearing bright yellow flight suits trimmed with blue, Ukrainian colors.

According to The Guardian:

When the cosmonauts were able to talk to family back on Earth, Artemyev was asked about the suits. He said every crew chose their own.

“It became our turn to pick a colour. But, in fact, we had accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it,” he said. “So that’s why we had to wear yellow.”

No one is fooled by that careful downplaying of their choice. It has breathtaking implications.

The cosmonauts could not do this on their own. Someone had to make the flight suits. Someone had to pack the flight suits. There are people whose entire job is stowing the items that go aboard a spacecraft. Every gram of weight is costly to lift into orbit and affects orbital calculations. Every square centimeter is precious. Everything is accounted for and has its place. (It also has to be packed just right. During the first Space Shuttle mission, we discovered that without gravity to press things down in lockers, everything that was snugly packed on the ground became tightly jammed in microgravity. Astronauts had to plant their feet on each side of an open locker and pull as hard as they could to remove whatever they needed. But I digress…)

Nobody is safe when Russia decides to get rid of them. They have sent assassins into the UK, where I live, poisoning people. They’ve done it in other countries too. There have been no substantial consequences for Russia on any occasion when they’ve done that, so from their perspective they can do it again with impunity. Everyone involved in sending those yellow flight suits to ISS is in danger now.

So is the ISS.

Anyone who works with spaceflight can tell you there are gazillions of ways a mission can become a catastrophe. Spacecraft are incredibly complex. Outer space is incredibly dangerous, and travel to and from it is even more so. The tiniest little glitch or gap or mistake can be deadly.

It would be easy to sabotage the ISS or a Soyuz capsule and make it look accidental, at least initially.

Those flight suits are not a mere stunt, but those cosmonauts are not the ones who forced politics into international spaceflight. Rogozin, and by implication Russia, had already done so. It is fitting that the pushback also came from Russians. It was also more courageous than most of us on the ground can ever comprehend.

Watch the ISS fly overhead. Hope that it stays up there as a beacon of international cooperation, and hope that its residents will remain safe in all that they do… up there, in transit and down here after their return. Because if any of that doesn’t happen, we’ll be in the first world war that extends into outer space. Recent “anti-satellite tests” by China and Russia to demonstrate their ability to destroy orbiting spacecraft are beginning to take on an entirely new, foreboding shade.