The U.S. and Russia's collaboration is a reversal from the Cold War 'space race.' U.S., Russia co-dependent in space

The U.S. and Russia have many disputes, but American space officials are grateful most remain on Earth.

Despite the well-known tensions between Washington and Moscow over the war in Syria, Russian missile deployments along the Polish border and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, NASA says its cooperation has gone on mostly uninterrupted with its Russian counterparts.


“It doesn’t appear that we are affected by what’s going on diplomatically with the Russians,” said Al Sofge, director of NASA’s human exploration and operations division. “I don’t know that we’ve ever even discussed it.”

That is good news for space advocates in both countries, analysts say, since the next phase of space exploration depends more on collaboration between the two nations than on the classic idea of competition.

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The next frontier in space will most likely be reached by NASA’s planned Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, now in development to support human travel to Mars as well as the exploration of the moon and asteroids. For now, though, Russia is the only game in town for human spaceflight. Since the retirement of NASA’s Space Shuttle in 2011, Russian spacecraft are the only way for astronauts from either country to reach the International Space Station.

It’s in the long-term interest of both the U.S. and Russia to collaborate their space efforts, said James Oberg, a former space engineer and expert on the U.S. and Russian space programs. He called the relationship between the two nations on space issues one of “reluctant co-dependency” — the U.S. has more-advanced electronics technology, but Russia currently has an advantage in manned spaceflight and launches.

That means that the Cold War’s onetime “space race” is different, Oberg said. He compared it to a bicycle race like the Tour de France, where the pack of riders keeps together in a “peloton” that lets them take turns fighting the wind and keeping an eye on each other until the final sprint to the finish.

That sounds a lot like NASA’s description of its daily relationship with its Russian counterpart.

“Day in, day out, I think the most frequent contact on site is that we’ve got NASA personnel and contractors talking with cosmonauts constantly,” said Meredith McKay, deputy director for human exploration and operations in NASA’s international and interagency relations office. “Cooperation internationally with NASA pretty much covers the breadth of what we do, and Russia is one of our biggest partners.”

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But there are challenges to working with any foreign nation, Sofge acknowledged.“They have their own culture and their own way of doing business.”

Sequestration and the diminishing U.S. leadership role in space further complicate matters, Sofge said. Budget cuts have meant less travel, for example, which has caused NASA to rely more on video, email and telephone communications in lieu of face-to-face meetings.

Russia, meanwhile, is increasing its space spending. In April, President Vladimir Putin announced that the country would spend 1.6 trillion rubles, or $51.8 billion, on its space sector from 2013 through 2020, giving it a higher growth rate than any other world power.

NASA’s post-sequestration operating budget for fiscal year 2013 was about $16.8 billion, nearly 6 percent below 2012 levels and many orders of magnitude beneath the Defense Department, which had a base budget around $539 billion.

Russia hasn’t shied away from promoting its newfound space superiority, either. A Soyuz spacecraft crew took the Olympic torch on a spacewalk in November to generate buzz for Russia’s 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. And Russia will reportedly charge NASA $71 million per astronaut to transport Americans to ISS aboard its Soyuz spacecraft starting in 2016.

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Space advocates in Washington have slammed the White House for letting things come to this point. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) warned as far back as 2008 that letting the Space Shuttle lapse could result in “Russia denying us rides or charging exorbitant amounts for them.”

And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the ranking member on Nelson’s Senate Science and Space Subcommittee, said the U.S. should rely more on defense and aerospace contractors — not the Russians — to pick up the slack in U.S. access to space.

“It’s critical that the United States ensures its continued leadership in space,” Cruz said.

For now, Oberg said, he expects Washington and Moscow to keep up their joint space operations despite their long-term diplomatic chill, because they need each other.

“There’s a lot of hand-waving about space partnership inspiring diplomacy,” he said. “That’s a lot of over-hype. Space partnerships reflect, rather than create, existing diplomatic relationships.”