Whether or not Russia’s top space official is serious, America should never have permitted Russia enough control over the ISS to make the threat plausible.
Whether or not Russia’s top space official is serious about crashing the ISS, America should never have permitted Russia enough control over it to make the threat plausible.
I n a threat right out of a James Bond movie, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s top space official raised the possibility of responding to American sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine by crashing the International Space Station (ISS) into the U.S. or another Russian enemy.
The threat is reminiscent of the 9/11 terrorist hijackings that caused mass casualties by intentionally crashing civilian aircraft. But the devastation wrought by similarly weaponizing the ISS would be far more catastrophic, with victims possibly numbering not in the thousands but in the tens of thousands or even millions. It is not an exaggeration to say that such an attack would be comparable to the use of a nuclear weapon, and could in fact be deadlier than some of the nuclear bombs in Russia’s arsenal. To hijack the ISS and put it on a collision course with one of Russia’s geopolitical foes, the two Russian cosmonauts currently living and working aboard the orbiting outpost would not even have to overpower the four NASA astronauts and one European astronaut also stationed there. The ISS is reliant upon support from the engines of Russia’s Progress MS cargo ships to maintain its orbit. Without Moscow’s cooperation, the station could enter an uncontrolled deorbit and crash anywhere along its flight path. As the ISS circles the globe in a low-Earth orbit, it passes over China, India, the United States, and much of Europe — but not Russia.
Worse, Russia could potentially use its control over the engines to intentionally deorbit the ISS into colliding with a specific target.
After President Joe Biden announced new sanctions intended to “degrade [Russia’s] aerospace industry, including their space program,” Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, noted on Twitter just how vulnerable the station would be to a withdrawal of Russian support. He implicitly threatened to crash the orbiting research laboratory into the U.S., Europe, or a highly populated country in Asia, where a crash would take the most lives.
“If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled descent out of orbit and a fall on the United States or Europe?” asked Rogozin on Twitter. “There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure on India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS doesn’t fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Gentlemen, when planning sanctions, check those who generate them for illness.”
A NASA spokesperson told CNN that the space agency “continues working with all our international partners, including the [Russian] State Space Corporation Roscosmos, for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station.” And it remains to be seen whether Rogozin’s threat was just bluster in the fog of war.
One would certainly hope that the presence of two cosmonauts on the ISS might give Moscow pause before turning the station into a projectile weapon. But as recently as November, Russia demonstrated total disregard for the safety of those very cosmonauts by testing an anti-satellite missile that exploded and threatened the station, forcing astronauts to take cover from potentially deadly debris.
The ISS is made mostly of very dense titanium, Kevlar, and high-grade steel, weighing in at roughly 463 tons, or roughly the weight of 330 automobiles. It is orbiting at a mind-boggling 17,500 miles per hour, but could accelerate beyond that if pushed from its orbit and crashed into the Earth. Its current orbit passes directly above Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, and Rome.
Reentering Earth’s atmosphere could cause the station to break into pieces, spreading the damage of its eventual impact over a wider area but resulting in a less intense explosion than if it were to crash in one piece. But if the station crashed while even somewhat intact, it would be like a small nuclear weapon going off because of its mass and speed. If it landed in the center of a densely populated city like Manhattan, it would leave a crater almost 4,300 feet wide and 1,530 feet deep while triggering a magnitude 6 earthquake, according to Purdue University’s impact calculator. Given the city’s population density, that would instantly vaporize tens of thousands of Americans, with indirect damage killing many more. And, of course, the four Americans aboard the ISS — who are due to return to Earth in April — would die before impact.
When it is time to retire the station, NASA plans to get around the impact risk by safely crashing the ISS into an uninhabited part of the southern Pacific Ocean in January 2031. However, Russia built the engines designed to control that process and has the power to disregard the previously accepted plan. This is why the world is, at least theoretically, currently at the mercy of Russian astro-bluster. Russia can make this sort of threat because the country has historically produced very effective rocket engines and the U.S. rocket industry was very weak when the ISS was being constructed.
This isn’t the first time Rogozin has used the threat of the ISS as a bargaining chip.
Right after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Rogozin threatened to cut off American access to the station if the U.S. retaliated, saying, “I propose that the United States delivers its astronauts to the ISS with the help of a trampoline.” (At that time, paying Russia was the only way to get astronauts into space, until the private company SpaceX recently gave us the capability to return to the station on American rockets.)
The United States paid $126 billion to build the ISS (once launch costs are factored in), while Russia put in less than $12 billion. Yet the station was even placed in an exceedingly unusual orbit at the request of the Russians so that it could be more easily reached by their rockets. These facts make it downright tragic that one of the greatest achievements of American science may now be turned against us.
The U.S. does have ways to potentially limit this threat besides just maintaining numerical superiority of astronauts on the station so that the U.S. and European crew members could disable the Russian segment in short order. If absolutely necessary, the Cygnus cargo spacecraft currently docked at the station could likely counteract anything they try with the Zvezda engine modules Russia controls. As a terrible war unfolds on Earth, we should hope that nothing bad happens in space to make it worse.