The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced last week that it would indefinitely suspend all communications and contact with its Russian counterpart, the Russian Federal Space Agency, or Roscosmos, as a result of the nation’s highly controversial actions regarding political unrest and tension in Ukraine, specifically in the contested region of Crimea.
NASA’s said its decision supposedly pertains to “the majority of its ongoing engagements with the Russian Federation,” although officials were careful to emphasize that operations onboard the International Space Station will continue on as scheduled.
However, the takeaway message is a dour one; it seems as though it is impossible to uproot space exploration and research from its tense Cold War-era beginnings.
Indeed, the most obvious conclusion is that the decision is an overtly political maneuver. An anonymous NASA scientist told The Verge that “NASA’s goals aren’t political. This is one of the first major actions I have heard of from the US government and it is to stop science and technology collaboration … You’re telling me there is nothing better?”
Since it began, the conflict in Ukraine, and more recently the region of Crimea, has served as a platform for the competing ideologies of Russia and the West, ideologies that are perhaps inexorably linked and extend back into the Cold War.
One interpretation of Russia’s current foreign policy sees its actions as a part of a natural post-Cold War backlash. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in an international context have certainly been colored by a fierce upsurge in nationalistic identity within the country, particularly following the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Characterized by language that emphasizes Russian strength and pride and trivializes the disdain of its Western competitors, Putin’s politics are most obvious in Russia’s alleged annexation of Crimea; this being the supposed cause of NASA’s abrupt and rather extreme cessation of contact with the Russian space program.
Even in the coldest moments of the Cold War, however, such drastic steps were never taken.
“In the Cold War era there was political antagonism, but that did not keep NASA from working with the Soviets on the 1975 in-orbit docking of the Apollo and Soyuz craft,” University of Nebraska professor of space law Frans Von Der Dunk said.
If Russian foreign policy remains relatively true to its Cold War analogue, then the only differentiating factor in this unfortunate equation is the United States. This raises the question: what is the cause, or even the benefit, of such dramatic and unprovoked action?
In fact, there might be more consequences than benefits. Throughout the Ukrainian conflict, the United States has maintained a position of intolerance with what NASA terms in its original memo as “Russia’s ongoing violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The U. S. has reacted according to this position by threatening economic sanctions and exclusionary measures against the Russian Federation, such as in its petition to have Russia removed from the G8. However, Russia has dismissed, or has even been invigorated by, these threats, maintaining that the West merely relishes any opportunity to put down or demonize the former Soviet Union.
Some believe that NASA’s abrupt decision is merely an attempt to kick start Congress into giving more funding to space and science research programs by highlighting the United States’ own inadequacy, including its reliance on Russia for transportation of materials and personnel to and from orbit. Space exploration, along with education and healthcare reform, have long topped the list of things that need additional funding, but halting international scientific progress over a political issue is not the right way to bring attention to the problem. Even if NASA received more funding, it would still have to make up for the United States’ newfound deficiencies created by lack of cooperation before any progress could be made.
Regardless of the obviously political motivation for NASA’s unilateral severance from Roscosmos, it bodes nothing positive for the future of U.S. relations with Russia or scientific progress in general. Russia has already made it abundantly clear that they do not respect maneuvers of this sort, so attempting to withdraw from mutual scientific cooperation does nothing but hinder our own ability to compete, and far more importantly, to collaborate on a global scale.
In the words of American astronaut Ron Garan, “In any crisis the worst thing we can do is stop talking. We should not sacrifice what works in an attempt to salvage what doesn’t.”
Johnny McCabe is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].
