How Russia became the street bully of space
Russia’s new nuclear space weapon has spurred White House and congressional warnings about Moscow’s irresponsibility on the global stage. Russia’s move isn’t surprising, given its frustration over the war with Ukraine and its failure to contain or fracture the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Yet this is another chapter in Moscow’s long decline in space leadership.
The post-Sputnik space race of the 1960s is a tale of American moon-landing triumph. But things could have turned out differently for the U.S. We often forget or ignore that the Soviet Union (and then Russia) continued to develop innovative space capabilities through the Cold War and beyond.
At the U.S. Air Force Academy in the late 1980s, I was a cadet studying Russian, learning astronautical engineering, and writing hundreds of lines of code to track advanced Soviet space stations orbiting overhead. While studying in Russia at the end of the 20th century, I ventured outside Moscow to the famous cosmonaut training center, Star City, where I drank vodka with current and former cosmonauts.
Our conversations on the eve of joint operations on the International Space Station were filled with optimism. Joint Russia-U.S. moon expeditions were a certainty, and Mars was next.
But in tandem with developments on the planet, Russia’s position as a leader in space gradually unraveled in the early 2000s. Russia’s significant space achievements meant it had a long way to fall. The U.S.
relied on Russia’s legacy Soyuz program to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station after the space-shuttle program ended in 2011. That continued until 2020, when SpaceX began providing those services. Beginning in 2000, America relied heavily on Russian RD-180 rocket engines to
. Read more on livemint.com
