Battles in the sky: Will Elon Musk fire up US-Russian space war?

Chennai

A launch that was scheduled to take place a few days earlier had to be aborted due to unfavourable weather conditions. The US aeronautics and space agency NASA has not developed any spacecraft of its own since the last space shuttle flight, in July 2011. In principle, this approach hasn’t changed, as the Crew Dragon spacecraft was produced by SpaceX, the private company founded by Tesla chief Elon Musk. The company retains ownership of the spacecraft.

Aerospace giant Boeing also wants to undertake unmanned spaceflight before the end of the year, using its Starliner spacecraft. It aims for manned flights in 2021. These developments do more than mark the return of the US into the elite club of nations that can transport people into outer space, which currently includes Russia and China; if the US also succeeds in developing two different spacecraft able to perform such a feat, it would take the lead in an unofficial race, and Russia would have to face a new competitor.

Yet Russia and the US have not exclusively seen one another as space rivals. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, cooperation between the two nations on crewed space flights boomed. US space shuttles flew to the Russian space station Mir, and their crews also included Russian cosmonauts. After the turn of the millennium, Russian spacecraft with US astronauts onboard regularly took off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan to go to the ISS. Russia only gained the monopoly on space travel following the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003, in which the American shuttle broke up minutes before it was to land in Florida, killing all seven crew members. The US consequently suspended its space flights for two years.

Even after that, Moscow had to act as space travel “taxi” for quite a while. “Russia couldn’t say no,” Igor Marinin, a member of the Russian space travel academy, told DW. It was impossible to keep the ISS operational without the Americans, Marinin added, also because “the Russian module could not travel through space autonomously.” Over the last nine years, there have been some 40 successful launches of Russian Soyuz spacecraft with US astronauts on board, four times per year on average. This had stretched the Russian industry to its limits, said Marinin.

It also hasn’t always been smooth sailing between NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos, as an incident in summer 2018 revealed. A Soyuz capsule docked to the ISS experienced a drop in pressure, and a hole was subsequently found and sealed. Roscosmos publicly suggested the hole was an act of sabotage and ordered an investigation, while Russian media circulated rumours that the Russian space agency was pointing its fingers at US astronauts as the source of the leak — allegations which the Americans rejected. NASA later said it would support the Roscosmos investigation. Overall, the era of Moscow and Washington’s close cooperation on space research seems to be coming to an end. The US intends to travel to the moon again — an aim also shared by Russia. Moscow also plans to build its own space station to replace the ISS. Space travel expert Andrei Ionin warned that the biggest achievement of the ISS program could be lost: the “invaluable experience of cooperation.” A return to nations going it alone in outer space would be a step backwards, he said — back to the space race of the 1960s.

— This article has been provided by Deutsche Welle (DW/dw.com)