New Sanctions Will Affect Russia's Space Program

1. Now the question is how much of a reserve does Russia have for future flights. According to Eric Berger the chemicals all comes from one source; Germany.

   https://twitter.com/SciGuyS…

2. Just heard President Biden say the sanctions will impact their space program. Going to be interesting to see if that means pulling the plug on them wrt ISS…….

   1. I don’t think so. As I understand it, that comment was in the context of a ban on sales of aerospace-related hardware. Something about aircraft production or maintenance being affected was mentioned in an adjacent sentence. If Soyuz uses any imports they no longer have access to, that could affect the September crew rotation, but other than that, there shouldn’t be a direct impact on ISS.

3. If they close off the SM from the FGB (Russian / US side) we lose almost all reboast capability and the ability to dampen out any off nominal attitude issues. If they undock the SM and related modules from ISS (assuming it does not crack open when they do) we lose ISS.

   1. The early modules were made to be permanent parts of the ISS and it would take some sustaining engineering time to figure out what could be detached. The Nauka could be detached but Zarya and Zvezda would be challenges. Zarya is officially owned by the US since we paid for it but Russia has hardly ever acknowledged that, they control it and have felt free to do things like turn off smoke alarms without telling us! We might be able to detach Zvezda and live without it. Zarya is also called the Functional Cargo Block or FGB.

      1. I believe we also own some of Nauka i.e. FGB-2 since we paid for a back up for the original FGB.

         1. That could easily be true, that we paid for a part of Nauka. But getting the Russians to acknowledge that now would be very difficult. We certainly paid for upgrades to Soyuz and a lot of other things (like travel for them from Moscow to Houston, hotels in Houston) but the Russians considered that something that we owed them!

4. Can we use Dragon or Starliner for reboost and for unloading the control moment gyros? How easy would it be to detach the US and Russian segments and operate each independently? The decision to cancel the US propulsion module and rely solely on the Russians was probably not smart.

   1. The new version of Cygnus can reboost and it is scheduled to do that once on the current mission.

5. Does anyone have an accurate translation of the quoted tweet?

   I understand the perils of using Google Translate, so I’m wondering how concerned I should be over its translation of the statement as: “To prevent your sanctions from falling on your head. And not only in a figurative sense.”

   For someone from Roscosmos to threaten something literally “falling on your head” would appear to be a direct threat to deorbit something.
   Russian components provide the majority of station-keeping thruster burns to keep ISS at altitude, does it not?

   This is hardly the first time Rogozin has said something controversial. It most often turns out to be Soviet-style bluster, but, given the current tensions, I wish I could be sure.

   1. It was not a threat. (I read and speak Russian.) He was merely observing that the orbit of ISS passes over our territories, but is south of Russia. The idea being that if we make it impossible for them to maintain their part of the station and it deorbits in an uncontrolled way, it might hit us, but it won’t hit them. (edited to remove improper autocorrect) Google Translate is definitely not your friend here.

      1. The ISS does pass over southern Russia, the inclination was picked so that it could be more easily supported by launches from Baikonur (now in Kazakstan of course).

6. I guess if we were really serious then we will withdraw from ISS. However, that won’t happen as billiions and billions were spent, also by other nations. Picture all that hardware i.e. huge Kibo module by Japan which will take a strong stomach to watch plummet and breakup into the atmosphere.

   1. A total waste of a worthwhile thing, and it would do nothing about dangers of potential de-orbiting.

7. With the Alzheimer’s reference, Rogozin was referring to the policy itself, not to members of the US administration, in the sense that we were forgetting about the downstream implications of the policy. There’s also an element of word play, as he wrote Alzheimer’s (альцгеймер) initially as АЛЬЦ-ГЕЙМЕР, using the hyphen to set of геймер, because that’s the Russian for gamer. That is to say, we’re playing this sanctions game and it could bite us on the backside.

8. Do we also lose the capability to make the ISS turn backflips?

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