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Originally Posted by Minnie
Leader of Russian Space Agency, Dmitry Rogozin making all kinds of threats on twitter right now. Basically threatening to de-orbit the ISS. The translation isn't exact, but that's the gist.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by agulati
Woof. That is absolutely crazy.
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Ehhh... not to seem like a Russian apologist, but if he's making a threat of deliberate action it's a very heavily veiled one.
A google translate copy of his tweets on the subject of Biden-imposed sanctions on the Russian space program, stitched together:
Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS? This is how you already do it by limiting exchanges between our cosmonaut and astronaut training centers. Or do you want to manage the ISS yourself? Maybe President Biden is off topic, so explain to him that the correction of the station's orbit, its avoidance of dangerous encounters with space debris, with which your talented businessmen have polluted the near-Earth orbit, is carried out exclusively by the engines of the Russian Progress MS cargo ships. If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the territory of the United States or Europe? There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?
Maybe if you read between enough lines you can conclude that he's threatening to de-orbit the ISS, but the way he said it he's making the point that the Russians are the ones who boost the station's orbit, and if as a result of sanctions they don't continue to boost it it puts everyone on the surface at risk.
(The bit about the station not flying over Russia is nonsense though, of course it flies over the biggest country on the planet, lol. Not all of it by any means, not far enough north to fly over Moscow, but its orbit shifts across the planet between roughly 52° N and S latitudes.)