CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) \u2014 U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei has made it through nearly a year in space, but faces what could be his trickiest assignment yet: riding a Russian capsule back to Earth in the midst of deepening tensions between the countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NASA insists Vande Hei\u2019s homecoming plans at the end of the month remain unchanged, even as Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in canceled launches, broken contracts and an escalating war of words by the Russian Space Agency\u2019s hardline leader. Many worry Dmitry Rogozin is putting decades of a peaceful off-the-planet partnership at risk, most notably at the International Space Station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vande Hei \u2014 who on Tuesday breaks the U.S. single spaceflight record of 340 days \u2014 is due to leave with two Russians aboard a Soyuz capsule for a touchdown in Kazakhstan on March 30. The astronaut will have logged 355 days in space by then, setting a new U.S. record. The world record of 438 continuous days in space belongs to Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, America\u2019s record-holder until Tuesday, is among those sparring with Rogozin, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin. Enraged by what\u2019s going on in Ukraine, Kelly has returned his Russian medal for space exploration to the Russian Embassy in Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the deadly conflict down here, Kelly believes the two sides \u201ccan hold it together\u201d up in space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe need an example set that two countries that historically have not been on the most friendly of terms, can still work somewhere peacefully. And that somewhere is the International Space Station. That\u2019s why we need to fight to keep it,\u201d Kelly told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NASA wants to keep the space station running until 2030, as do the European, Japanese and Canadian space agencies, while the Russians have not committed beyond the original end date of 2024 or so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The U.S. and Russia are the prime operators of the orbiting outpost, permanently occupied for 21 years. Until SpaceX started launching astronauts in 2020, Americans regularly hitched rides on Russian Soyuz capsules for tens of millions of dollars per seat. The U.S. and Russian space agencies are still working on a long-term barter system in which a Russian would launch on a SpaceX capsule beginning this fall and an American would fly up on the Soyuz. That would help ensure a U.S. and Russian station presence at all times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vande Hei, 55, a retired Army colonel, moved into the space station last April, launching on a Soyuz from Kazakhstan with Pyotr Dubrov and another Russian. He and Dubrov stayed twice as long as usual to accommodate a Russian film crew that visited in October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As the situation 260 miles (420 kilometers) below intensified last month, Vande Hei acknowledged he was avoiding conversations about Ukraine with Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov, their Russian commander. Three more Russians will blast off from Kazakhstan on Friday to replace them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe haven\u2019t talked about that too much. I\u2019m not sure we really want to go there,\u201d Vande Hei told a TV interviewer in mid-February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Space station operations continue as always \u2014 in orbit and on Earth, according to NASA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt would be a sad day for international operations if we can\u2019t continue to peacefully operate in space,\u201d said NASA\u2019s human spaceflight chief Kathy Lueders, who noted it would be \u201cvery difficult\u201d to go it alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To mark Tuesday\u2019s milestone, NASA turned to Twitter to gather questions for video-recorded responses, and some asked whether Vande Hei might switch to an American ride home. SpaceX is taking three wealthy businessmen and their ex-astronaut escort to the space station at the end of March for a brief visit. Then in mid-April, SpaceX will deliver four astronauts for NASA before bringing back four who have been on board since November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NASA and SpaceX officials refuse to speculate on whether a seat could be made available. They say a NASA plane and small team will be on hand in Kazakhstan, as usual, to whisk Vande Hei back home to Houston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Former NASA astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, whose father was born in Ukraine, concedes it\u2019s a difficult situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019re sanctioning Russia. Companies are pulling out of doing business in Russia. But then yet you still have the U.S. government \u2014 the space agency \u2014 doing business with the Russians,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can\u2019t push a button and separate the two\u201d sides of the space station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Besides threatening to pull out of the space station and drop it on the U.S., Europe or elsewhere, Rogozin had the flags of other countries covered on a Soyuz rocket awaiting liftoff with internet satellites earlier this month. The launch was called off, after the customer, London-based OneWeb, refused his demands that the satellites not be used for military purposes and the British government halt its financial backing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The European Space Agency also is reeling. After missing a 2020 launch deadline for its Mars rover \u2014 a joint European-Russian effort \u2014 the project was on track for a September liftoff from Kazakhstan. Now it\u2019s most likely off until 2024, the next opportunity for Earth and Mars to be properly aligned. And Russia has pulled its staff out of the French-run launch site in South America, suspending Soyuz launches of European satellites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All this comes on top of the Russian government\u2019s antisatellite missile test in November that added countless pieces of junk to the debris already encircling Earth and put the space station\u2019s four Americans, two Russians and one German on alert for days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jeffrey Manber, now with the private Voyager Space company, helped forge U.S. and Russian ties back in the mid-1990s, with the first piece of the space station launching in 1998. He sees the outpost as \u201cone of the final holdouts of collaboration\u201d between the two countries. But, he added, \u201cthere is no going back if the partnership is ended and the result is a premature ending of the ISS program.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regardless of how things play out at the space station, John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University, expects it will mark the end of large-scale space cooperation between Russia and the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cRussia has been moving toward China already, and the current situation will probably accelerate that move,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Vande Hei has been silent on Twitter, Kelly and others have gone into overdrive, taking offense at Rogozin\u2019s threats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Elon Musk\u2019s private SpaceX took a swipe at Rogozin after he said Russia would stop supplying rocket engines to U.S. companies \u2014 Northrop Grumman and United Launch Alliance \u2014 adding they could use broomsticks to get to orbit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a launch last week, a SpaceX official responded: \u201cTime to let the American broomstick fly and hear the sounds of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) \u2014 U.S. astronaut Mark Vande H […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1310,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions\/1310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}