Russia is gearing up for an era of renewed competition in space, a top Moscow official said Thursday, following years of cooperation with the United States.
“This is our top priority today,” Roscosmos director-general Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview with state-run media. “We will enshrine this in a new strategy, which we will adopt later this year, that is, to regain Russia’s leadership in space, pure and simple.”
Space cooperation has been a bright spot for U.S.-Russia policy since the end of the Cold War, even through the recent decline in diplomatic relations. Rogozin, echoing a top White House adviser’s comments to the Washington Examiner this year, repudiated the idea that “space is beyond politics” and blamed U.S. policymakers for compromising the relationship.
“I think that America is actually engulfed by its second civil war now,” Rogozin, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. and the European Union, just days after NASA announced that his impending visit to the Texas would be postponed. “This is complete international lawlessness, and I absolutely don’t care about those motives which guided people in the Obama administration or the current Senate.”
Russia has denied invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential elections — behavior that American lawmakers cited when mandating a new round of sanctions on the former Cold War adversary in 2017. Those sanctions did not interfere with space-related cooperation; hundreds of Americans work in Russia to support the International Space Station, and U.S. astronauts rely on Russian rockets to reach the ISS.
Still, Russia has developed weaponry that could threaten U.S. space capabilities, according to American officials — a thorny matter than arms control negotiators have failed to resolve.
“There is not a good definition as to what a weapon is or how would you know it if you see it,” Scott Pace, the executive director of the National Space Council, told the Washington Examiner last year.
Pace acknowledged that U.S.-Russia tensions might undermine ISS cooperation. “This is the thing that space people don’t always want to understand: that we cooperate in space after we’ve decided it’s in our interest to do so from the ground,” he said.
