Russian Space Agency Chief Threatens to End Cooperation Over Western Sanctions

The head of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, is again threatening to end service to the International Space Station, saying Russia will stop supplying rocket engines to the United States and may curtail cooperation on the station in retaliation for Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. NASA says operations on the orbiting observatory are normal.

In an interview with Russian state television Thursday, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said, considering the situation, “We can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don’t know what.”

Rogozin said Russia has delivered 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S. since the 1990s, of which 98 have been used to power Atlas launch vehicles. The Washington Post said the engines are also used by United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing to launch national security missions for the Pentagon.

Russia said it would cut off the supply of the RD-181 engines used in Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which is used to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.

Projects with Germans scrapped

Rogozin tweeted Thursday that Russian cosmonauts would not cooperate with Germany on joint experiments on the Russian segment of the ISS. Roscosmos will conduct them independently. He went on to say 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.”

Earlier in the week, in another interview with state television, Rogozin noted Russia is responsible for space station navigation, as well as fuel deliveries to the orbiting lab. He said Roscosmos “will closely monitor the actions of our American partners and, if they continue to be hostile, we will return to the question of the existence of the International Space Station.”

Russia had announced earlier that it was suspending cooperation with Europe on space launches from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana in response to Western sanctions.

Cooperation in space has traditionally avoided politics, and when asked about the situation Tuesday during a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said, “Despite the challenges here on Earth, and they are substantial …. NASA continues the working relationship with all our international partners to ensure their safety and the ongoing safe operations of the ISS.”

Some information for this report came from Reuters.

Satellite Photos Show Another Failed Iran Space Launch

Iran likely suffered another failed launch of a satellite-carrying rocket in recent days, even as Tehran faces last-minute negotiations with world powers to save its tattered nuclear deal in Vienna.

Satellite images from Maxar Technologies seen by The Associated Press show scorch marks at a launch pad at Imam Khomeini Spaceport in Iran’s rural Semnan province on Sunday. A rocket stand on the pad appears scorched and damaged, with vehicles surrounding it. An object, possibly part of the gantry, sits near it.

Successful launches typically don’t damage rocket gantries because they are lowered before takeoff. Iran also usually trumpets launches that reach space on its state-run television channels, but it has a history of not acknowledging failed attempts.

Separate images from Planet Labs PBC suggest the attempted launch likely occurred sometime after Friday. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the U.S. military.

The rocket involved appears to have been Iran’s Zuljanah satellite launch vehicle, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, who first noticed the attempted launch with colleagues.

It remains unclear what could have caused the blast. The first two stages of a Zuljanah are solid fuel, but its final stage is liquid and would have needed to be fueled on the launch pad, Lewis said.

“This just looks like it got interrupted, like something exploded,” Lewis told the AP.

Over the past decade, Iran has sent several short-lived satellites into orbit and in 2013 launched a monkey into space. The program has seen recent troubles, however. There have been five failed launches in a row for the Simorgh program, another satellite-carrying rocket. A separate fire at the Imam Khomeini Spaceport in February 2019 also killed three researchers, authorities said at the time.

The successive failures raised suspicion of outside interference in Iran’s program. There’s been no evidence offered, however, to show foul play in any of the failures, and space launches remain challenging even for the world’s most successful programs.

Meanwhile, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in April 2020 revealed its own secret space program by successfully launching a satellite into orbit. The head of the U.S. Space Command later dismissed the satellite as “a tumbling webcam in space” that wouldn’t provide Iran vital intelligence — though it showed Tehran’s ability to successfully get into orbit.

This launch, however, comes as Western diplomats warn time is ticking down to restore Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, which saw Tehran drastically limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018, setting the stage for years of tensions and mysterious attacks across the wider Mideast.

The U.S. has alleged such satellite launches defy a U.N. Security Council resolution and called on Iran to undertake no activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

Iran, which long has said it does not seek nuclear weapons, previously maintained that its satellite launches and rocket tests do not have a military component. U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency say Iran abandoned an organized military nuclear program in 2003.

Today, Tehran enriches uranium up to 60% purity — a short technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90% and far greater than the nuclear deal’s 3.67% cap. Its stockpile of enriched uranium also continues to grow and international inspectors face challenges in monitoring its advances.

While Iran’s former President Hassan Rouhani dialed back the country’s space program for fears of alienating the West, new hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi has focused on jumpstarting the program. Iran has a series of satellites it plans to launch, and Iran’s Supreme Council of Space recently met for the first time in 11 years.

Collapse of the Space building: history of the decision that saved 22 families - Medellín - Colombia

In October 2013, at the age of 35, Jaime Enrique Gómez Zapata made a decision that changed his life and that of 22 families. Faced with the imminence of what would be a tragedy, he ordered the immediate evacuation of a building that, 34 hours later, collapsed. This is his story.

(Also read: Ex-participant of the ‘Challenge’ tells how he experienced the collapse of the Space building)

Jaime Enrique is a geologist. He knows very well the risks inherent to our geography. He has a specialization in prevention and response to natural disasters and a master’s degree in risk management and the environment. He began his career as an intern at the Medellín Municipal Disaster Prevention and Attention System (SIMPAD), which, years later, after the issuance of Law 1523 of 2012, became the Disaster Risk Management Administrative Department. (DAGRD). There he dedicated himself to visiting districts of Medellin and working on the prevention of mass movementsthe main threatening phenomenon in this mountainous area of ​​the country.

(See also: The unknown story of the refinery that changed the course of the country)

In 2008, after facing several emergencies due to rains -Jaime especially remembers the one in the El Socorro neighborhood, where 27 people died due to the magnitude of a landslide, as well as the tragedy in the Alto Verde urbanization, in the El Poblado neighborhood, where a landslide fell on six homes-, the capital of Antioquia declared a manifest emergency, in order to improve its response capacity in these situations, and for this it hired a team of engineers and geologists.

Jaime became a kind of mentor and taught them how to function in the field: he explained how to carry out risk inspections and what they should take into account during their visits. Thus, he soon took on a leadership role and in 2010 he became SIMPAD’s operational coordinator. Two years later he was appointed as deputy director of knowledge and risk reduction of the DAGRD, a position he held until the end of 2019.

Precisely, in that position he faced what, according to him, has been one of his greatest professional challenges to date.

(Of interest: The drama of merchants who close businesses for extortion in Barranquilla)

Currently, Jaime Enrique Gómez is director of the Administrative Department of Risk Management of Antioquia (DAGRAN).

The tragedy

Saturday, October 12, 2013. Tower 6 of the Space, a building located within a complex of apartments in the El Poblado neighborhood, in Medellín, collapsed around 7 at night. Tons of concrete went to the floor in a matter of minutes. At that time, Jaime was at his house, about to go out to eat with his wife and some of his friends. His phone started to ring. A wave of calls and messages confirmed what he knew the day before would happen sooner or later: Tower 6 of Space had collapsed, built six years ago by the Lérida CDO firm.

It wasn’t a hunch or a whimsical suspicion. It was the opinion of his expertise in risk management.

(In other news: In Medellín, the mask will no longer be used in public spaces from today)

Carlos Gil, the then director of the DAGRD, was on vacation and Jaime, as deputy director, took over as director in charge. That Friday morning, Jaime says, a call came to the 123 emergency line, in which “An elderly woman reported that the building had shaken, that it had sounded very hard, and that one of the walls of her apartment had cracked.”

The notice reached the office that the geologist was in charge of at the time. Jaime had a bad feeling, since it was an exclusive sector of Medellin where buildings do not usually present this type of complication. Immediately, he left the office for Space accompanied by three engineers from the mayor’s office and a team of firefighters to carry out the inspection.

This is what the building area looked like hours after the collapse, on Saturday, October 12, 2013.

Photo:

John Lopez. Archive THE TIME

“We arrived at the site. We spoke with the engineers (of the construction company) and they told us that there was no risk. The representatives of the construction company said the same thing, that there was no risk. That it was a punctual damage and they were going to solve it, ”he recalls.

However, the inspection ruled out that hypothesis. “We started to do a tour of the building and we saw some dangerous conditions in the structure. For example, the building looked tilted, we saw bent windows and cracks in the walls. And there we said: ‘something is happening here’”.

Jaime remembers the exact moment when he made the decision to order the evacuation.

With the inspection teams he had arrived at an apartment on the fourth floor. From the ninth floor downwards, the deterioration was progressive in the structure and its common areas, but at that point they showed an alarming signal: “there was a column with a crack due to compression failure, that is, the column was supporting more weight than it could ”.

(Other news from the country: Landslide in Manizales leaves 4 injured and 10 homes destroyed)

The geologist narrates that image with the precision of what is recorded in memory. “A part of the column was outside, in the corridor. And the other towards the interior of the apartment, in the kitchen. We checked it and realized that it was releasing a kind of dust, which indicated that the structure was in movement”.

For that moment there was only one certainty in his head: it was urgent to evacuate the building.

And despite the fact that construction officials continued to express their disagreement, Jaime and the inspection team met with the residents and told them they had to get out of there. “At no time did I doubt the decision I made,” he says.

The residential building had 24 floors and was located in the exclusive El Poblado sector of Medellín.

Photo:

John Lopez. Archive THE TIME

We checked the column and realized that it was releasing a kind of dust, which indicated that the structure was in movement

The recommendation was to evacuate tower 6 in its entirety. It was risky to be there, as there were clear signs that it could collapse. It was explained to the residents that they had to take out what was necessary and agree with the construction company on their place of stay for that night and the following ones. The community complied with the order. The versions that denied the risk of collapse, fortunately, did not persuade them.

That night, when they arrived at the building to issue the order that the authorities had issued hours earlier to the permanence to prohibit entry to the structure, the police officers realized that there was no one inside. The 22 resident families had left on time.

However, the calm was not complete.

At the time of the collapse, 12 people were in Tower 6 of Space. The rescue of their bodies ended 10 days after the tragedy. The investigation into the death of 11 of the victims (10 workers and a security guard) concluded in September 2014, after the construction company and the families reached a compensation agreement. And in the remaining case, that of a young man who was in the parking area, in 2019 the Supreme Court of Justice acquitted and ordered the release of Pablo Villegas Mesa, María Cecilia Posada Grisales and Jorge de Jesús Aristizábal Ochoa, former directors of the construction company. Lleida CDO, who had been convicted in that case.

In this regard, Jaime comments that the workers, for example, were aware of the restriction. “They were failing to comply with the recommendation that no work of any kind could be carried out until a safe plan was presented.”

On the Space lot, last October the news of the registration of the lot of almost 11,000 square meters where the building was built was knownwhich would allow it to be put up for sale and thus recover part of the money lost by those affected, who, in addition to spending years paying the bills for an uninhabited building, have reported breaches by the construction company.

(In context: Sell the lot, last hope of reparation for those affected by Space)

This is what the debris from the Space building looked like two days after the collapse.

Photo:

William Bear. Archive THE TIME

A decision that saved lives

After the tragedy, the mayor of Medellín asked the Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad de los Andes to issue its opinion on this case, which was key in the subsequent process. In the opinion of the specialists of that institution, if it had been designed in compliance with all the applicable requirements of Law 400 of 1997, the structure of the building “would not have manifested the collapse it presented under the imposed conditions.”

The building did have problems of differential settlements, which were intervened in August 2013. But the structure still had notable flaws.

When he talks about this episode, Jaime’s voice fills with pride. He makes it clear, however, that he doesn’t feel like a hero or anything like that. He acknowledges that his decision saved the lives of many people, but emphasizes: “we were just doing our job”.

In fact, he says that just last year he really measured the work they did that Friday in 2013. It was in June, when the world’s news reported that a 12-story building had collapsed in Surfside, Florida (United States), in the middle of at night while its inhabitants slept, causing the death of 98 people.

For Jaime it was inevitable to think about Space. “We saved many people’s lives,” he says today, almost nine years later, remarkably moved.

(Keep reading: Miami, Space and tragic building collapses around the world)

At the moment, he is director of the Administrative Department of Risk Management of Antioquia (DAGRAN), a dependency that works in that department designing strategies and programs aimed at risk reduction and disaster management. And he says he continues with the same motivation of his first day as an intern at SIMPAD, the one that also accompanied him to overcome the emergency in the Space building: to serve others.

WILLIAM MORENO HERNANDEZ
ELTIEMPO.COM journalist
On twitter: @williammoher

China Sets 5-Year Commercial, Scientific Plans for Space

SAN FRANCISCO — 

A Chinese rocket, according to astronomers, is expected to crash into the moon on March 4. It is the latest example of China’s presence in space. News of the predicted crash comes after Beijing released a development blueprint for satellite improvements, deep-space exploration and putting more people in orbit.

Analysts expect Beijing to reach many of the goals outlined in its five-year plan for the development of outer space despite the odd mishap, according to experts.

China’s space program stands to rival those of Russia and the United States, especially in terms of commercializing space technology, they add.

“China is something to look at seriously in terms of increasing competitiveness,” said Marco Caceres, director of space studies at the Teal Group market analysis firm. “Part of that is that the U.S. was ahead by so much that countries like China, where their economies are growing faster, they’re simply catching up.”

Past meets future

China launched its first satellite in 1970 and put its first human in space in 2003, becoming the world’s third nation, after Russia and the United States, to reach that milestone. In 2019, China’s spacecraft made a historic landing on the far side of the moon. Beijing is in the process of adding onto its Tiangong space station later this year.

China is excluded from the International Space Station, a cooperative operation among Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada and Japan, due to U.S. national security concerns.

Over the next five years, Beijing’s space program will place people in space on “long-term assignments” for scientific research, complete findings on Mars and explore the Jupiter system, according to China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective.

The coming half-decade will see improvements as well in the capacity of space transport systems, and China will “continue to improve its space infrastructure” through integration of remote sensing, communications, navigation and satellite positioning technologies, the document says.

China will probably realize its five-year goals because it has been working on them for a decade or more, with plenty of government funding, analysts say.

The January report effectively “bundles” together what’s already taking shape, said Richard Bitzinger, defense analyst with the Defense Budget Project, a research nonprofit in Washington. It’s technically possible that China could mine ore on an asteroid, Bitzinger said, though the job would require complex anchoring and drilling work.

A lot of the blueprint goals are meant to exude peaceful intent and a positive international image, he added. “Most manned space programs are symbolic,” Bitzinger said. “From an economic sense, they’re a loss leader, but from a sense of demonstrating power, they’re perfect for that.”

The blueprint says future Chinese space missions will remain “peaceful,” despite suspicion in Washington that the Chinese space program will be directed toward military purposes.

Commercial momentum

Progress in the Chinese space program has allowed China to become what Caceres describes as more “aggressive” than the United States in marketing satellites and modern launch services. Its budget probably grows faster than NASA’s, he added. Chinese space-related gear can be found in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the analyst said.

Countries such as Australia and Japan already use Chinese space-based remote sensing data after natural disasters. Russia and China tentatively agreed in September to open a joint lunar research base.

“China calls on all countries to work together to build a global community of (a) shared future and carry out in-depth exchanges and cooperation in outer space on the basis of equality, mutual benefit, peaceful utilization, and inclusive development,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington told VOA on Wednesday.

Some of the countries closest to China geographically may still hold out for U.S. space technology despite China’s willingness to engage, said Alan Chong, associate professor at the Singapore-based S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

The government of Myanmar, for example, resents China over infrastructure debt and projects that people see as irrelevant to their lives, the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies has found.

“I think the situation is fluid, and I wouldn’t say that Southeast Asia will be comfortably in the Chinese orbit yet,” Chong said. “It has of course never been friendlier with China, over the past 15 years or so, but I think the game is not over for the United States.”

The Week in Space: Winter Olympics Edition

NASA says global temperatures are on the rise, and that could spell trouble for future Winter Games. Plus, Australian astronomers discover an unidentified space object, and a pair of satellites touch the sky. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us a Winter Olympics-edition of The Week in Space.