Russian space agency Roscosmos ceases joint experiments on International Space Station

Moscow, Russia

Russian space agency Roscosmos has ceased joint experiments with Germany on the International Space Station.

"The Russian space program will be adjusted against the backdrop of sanctions, the priority will be the creation of satellites in the interests of defense," Roscosmos said in the tweet.

The massive global backlash to Moscow's invasion a week ago has already affected a range of scientific initiatives, including a planned Russian-European mission to land a rover on Mars.

"Offlining the satellites of any country is actually a casus belli, a cause for war," said Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin.

Also read | Astronomers map 1 million space objects that have never been spotted before

Rogozin also said his agency wanted British-based tech firm OneWeb to provide guarantees that its satellites are not going to be used against Russia.

Without these, Rogozin said Russia will cancel the planned March 4 launch of 36 OneWeb satellites from the Baikonur cosmodrome, which Russia rents from Kazakhstan, without compensating OneWeb

Western sanctions have cut Russia off from many global initiatives over the last week. NASA is exploring ways to keep the International Space Station, long home to both astronauts and cosmonauts, in orbit without Russian help.

Also see | International Space Station: Humanity's enduring presence in space

The European Space Agency meanwhile said a joint mission using a Russian launcher to land a European rover on Mars was "very unlikely" to take off this year as planned.

The ISS itself was born in part from a foreign policy initiative to improve US-Russian relations following the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of Cold War rivalry that spurred the original US-Soviet space race.

But US-Russian ties have frayed since Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimea region from Ukraine, prompting Congress to ban new government contracts with US companies using Russian rocket engineers for national security launches after 2022.

After ending its space shuttle program in 2011, the United States began paying Roscosmos to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the space station aboard Soyuz capsules. NASA resumed launching its own crew members from US soil in 2020, even as it continued to hitch some rides on Soyuz.

Even before the Ukraine crisis escalated in recent weeks, US-Russian space cooperation was shaken in mid-November when Russia blasted one of its own defunct surveillance satellites in an unannounced missile test that generated a debris field in low-Earth orbit, threatening the space station.

(With inputs from agencies)