Vladimir Putin’s war is spreading to space: Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, is threatening to strand NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei aboard the International Space Station.
The threat to maroon the American — scheduled to touch down in Kazakhstan next month with two Russian cosmonauts aboard a Russian spacecraft — came after President Biden imposed sanctions over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Rogozin, a close Putin ally, has also refused to launch a UK satellite company’s payloads, stopped supplying Russian-built rocket engines to US customers and even threatened to cut ties to NASA and disconnect the Russian section from the ISS.
Even in the Cold War, peaceful international cooperation was the sacred rule for civilian space programs. Count this as at least one way Putin is worse than than the USSR.
Getting Vande Hei will likely be a job for Elon Musk, whose Space X gives NASA an alternative to the Russian spacecraft it formerly relied on exclusively to ferry US astronauts to and from ISS.
SpaceX is already countering Putin by supplying Internet access to Ukrainians at the front via Starlink, which prompted Rogozin to darkly warn that Musk has “chosen his side.”
All those who fumed about the billionaires spending their own money on “vanity” space initiatives has yet more reason to eat their words.