In lieu of the ongoing conflict between the Russians and the Ukrainians, Russia has made an announcement that it has decided to fully quit the International Space Station “after 2024”.
This announcement was made by the newly-appointed chief of Moscow’s space agency who had made the report to President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
The announcement is also coming on the heels of the tensions which have been raging between the Kremlin and the West over Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine and several rounds of unprecedented sanctions against Russia. Russia and the United States have worked side by side on the ISS, which has been in orbit since 1998.
“Of course, we will fulfil all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to leave this station after 2024 has been made,” Yury Borisov, who was appointed Roscosmos chief in mid-July, told Putin.
“I think that by this time we will start putting together a Russian orbital station,” Borisov added, calling it the space programme’s main “priority”.
“Good,” Putin replied in comments released by the Kremlin.
Until now space exploration was one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the United States and its allies had not been wrecked by tensions over Ukraine and elsewhere.
Borisov said the space industry was in a “difficult situation”.
He said he would seek “to raise the bar, and first of all, to provide the Russian economy with the necessary space services”, pointing to navigation, communication, and data transmission, among other things.
Sending the first man into space in 1961 and launching the first satellite four years earlier are among key accomplishments of the Soviet space programme and remain a major source of national pride in Russia.
