Main Engine Cut Off - T+222: Rogozin Out, Seat Exchange Signed

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Some thoughts on where we are now that Dmitry Rogozin has been dismissed as head of Roscosmos, and that NASA and Roscosmos have signed a seat exchange agreement for future flights to the ISS.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 executive producers—Simon, Lauren, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, and seven anonymous—and 805 other supporters.TopicsRogozin Out, Seat Swaps In – SpacePolicyOnline.comThe trampoline is now international: NASA and Roscosmos agree to seat swap | Ars TechnicaParabolicarc.com on Twitter: “A little late to this, but my guess is Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov is being shunted off to Roscomos due to poor performance in Ukraine of the military industrial complex he oversaw. Putin periodically says nice things about space program but really doesn't seem to care.”The ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by ESA/JAXA

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and I want to talk today about a couple of stories affecting the ISS partnership and geopolitics at large for NASA. We'll start off with the news that Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of Roscosmos, is now the former head of Roscosmos. He was removed from his position. It is not yet clear where he's heading. There's some speculation that he will be, you know, in charge or whatever of the Donbass region from the Russian federation it's unclear exactly where it's heading yet but likely up into the presidential administration uh he's been very close to vladimir putin over the last couple years so chances are he's heading somewhere like that um there's a lot of a lot of

intricacies to this story um separately the seat exchange agreement between NASA and Roscosmos has been officially signed, so they're now going to be flying integrated crews. There will always be a NASA or partner astronaut on a Soyuz flight, and I say always, but that is honestly a little bit unclear to me, so we'll dig into that in a little bit. And there will be cosmonauts flying on commercial crew flights here, specifically SpaceX Crew 5 and 6. There's already a cosmonaut sl flying on commercial crew flights here, specifically SpaceX crew five and six, there's already a cosmonaut slated for each of those. So these stories were announced on the same day. The connection between them seems coincidental. But you know, fun to speculate if Rogozin was holding up this agreement, or I think somebody in the discord, the off nominal discord

said that this is kind of the mods are asleep. So you can do whatever you want. You know, when the heteros cause was out, you can sign an agreement real quick before the new one is in. So that could have been what happened here. But let's dig into these separately. So I want to read a little bit from a Space Policy Online article by Marsha Smith, because she had a great rundown of what's going on here with Rogozin. In a very brief statement, the Kremlin announced that Rogozin had been, quote, dismissed as General Director of the State Space Corporation, Roscosmos, effective immediately. Russia's state news agency TASS

later reported that Yuri Borisov has replaced him, adding that Rogozin's, quote, resignation was not related to any complaints and that he would receive a new appointment. Until today, Borisov was Russia's deputy prime minister for the defense and aerospace sectors, a job he got in 2018 after Putin demoted Rogozin from that very position after reportedly falling out of favor. So this is Anthony again. That's a good background on exactly how this all went down. So Rogozin, back in the days that he was tweeting about how the Americans should use a trampoline to get to the ISS, was in charge of the defense and aerospace sector at large, and was eventually demoted to just Roscosmos. And I think that might help explain why in the last couple of years Rogozin has been such a performative shit poster when it really

comes down to it, right? He's been tweeting nonstop, very nationalistic sentiment kind of stuff, a lot about the war in Ukraine, and a lot about attacking any perceived enemies in the world, right? Even real or perceived. He's been tweeting nonstop about this stuff, really going to bat for the position of Vladimir Putin and everything else that Russia has been up to under his watch. And I think a lot of that could be seen as him trying to curry favor with Putin because he was on the outs since 2018. And Putin likes that performative display of patriotism, right? And of rabble rousing and, you know, prodding NASA and poking, you know, Europe and poking the US policy. Like, there's so many different angles he's been threatening. Nukes,

he threatened to drop the ISS on top of India or China if NASA doesn't like the way that Russia's running their affairs. There's just been so many different things. And that's not even to dig back a little bit into the past and talk about the story where there was a hole in the Soyuz. And he was the one saying that there was a NASA astronaut who went crazy in space and drilled a hole. And that's why they wanted to do that so that they can get back to Earth. All this stuff that was just total nonsense. And, you know, NASA was very slow to respond to all of those things. Recently has, you know, responded to this event on the ISS where they flew the Donbass and Luhansk flags. And NASA, after a couple of hours, I think it was,

maybe even days, finally came out and said that they denounced the use of the ISS for political statements like that. So there's just been, you know, increasing tensions over the last couple of years. And I've obviously talked about it, if you've been listening to the show for a while. Even before all this started, I was saying that, you know, NASA should buy out Roscosmos from the ISS and split ways. I've been extremely, I guess, hawkish, you could say, on the state of the Russian space industry, because it's been in shambles for years now, and it's been led by a man who just wants to keep ratcheting up tension because it's good for him personally to curry favor with Putin. So, you know, if that's

all the context that went in around this, and if he's raised his status with Putin to get to some other position, right? Because Rogozin's not like a space nerd in his DNA. He's not like somebody who was always into this and always working in the space industry. So he, you know, cares about Roscosmos as much as it matters for himself personally. At least that's as it appears from the outside, because if you legitimately cared about Roscosmos, you wouldn't be doing some of the things that Rogozin's been doing the past several years. So if he successfully used this to raise his own personal status and move up into some higher position as he sees it, then I think that's exactly what is going on here. Now, I liked Doug Messier of Parabolic Arc. He had a tweet a couple of days

ago about what happened here with Yuri Borisov being put in Roscosmos instead of Rogozin. I'm just going to read this tweet because I think it does help explain, you know, if we're seeing Rogozin's demotion in 2018 from the Deputy Prime Minister of Defense and Aerospace down to Roscosmos, if that's a demotion, then Yuri Borosov is also getting demoted here. So we should think a little bit about what's going on there. So Doug said, a little late to this, but my guess is Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borosov is being shunted off the Roscosmos due to poor performance in Ukraine of the military-industrial complex he oversaw. Putin periodically says nice things about space program, but he really doesn't seem to care. He goes on from there, but I think that's a good bit of insight as to why this demotion is happening as well. So, Rogozin sees himself out to some higher level thing in Russia and somebody that was in charge of the industry that has failed

to many people's expectations in Ukraine is being put into Roscosmos. Now, is this good or bad, right? Because I think everyone was celebrating when Rogozin was finally freed of Roscosmos, or I guess vice versa, right, when Roscosmos was freed of Rogozin. Now, there's two parts to that. I don't really know that Yuri Borisov is going to be better in terms of policy stances or the nationalistic sentiment that's been on the ISS or the general positioning between Russia and the rest of the world, I don't really think that's going to get better. It's a little bit like expecting, you know, a new senator from Alabama to all of a sudden decide they're not going to support SLS as much as the last person was. You know, you became the senator of Alabama because you cared about certain things and you are now the senator of Alabama who has to care about certain things. So I think there is certain baggage that comes with any particular political

position, right? Anywhere in the world, you get there because of the moves that you've made to get there that often involve the same influences where the last person was in the role, you know, the same influences they had as well. So I don't really think that side of things is going to be better. What I do think is, I don't know Yuri Borisov's Twitter handle. I haven't seen a lot of rabble-rousing tweets from Yuri Borisov. Maybe they're out there. Maybe he will ramp up the tweets around the US and Russia space fight, I guess you would say. But I don't necessarily think so. So that would be a good thing. Because every time Rogozin went out, started posting all this stuff, and started, you know, rabble rousing, as I keep saying, every time that happened, that was an opportunity for people to start asking questions about the partnership on the ISS,

that was an opportunity for people to start asking questions about the partnership on the ISS and about why NASA, ESA, Canada, JAXA, why they are all still working with somebody who is saying these kind of things. And it was something that I talked a lot about and, you know, people like myself in the space industry talked about. Actual journalists had that opportunity to ask questions of NASA and always aska what the response was to you know rugozan threatening nuclear war or threatening the de-orbit of the iss it got headlines everywhere it broke out of the space industry right it wasn't just jeff faust of space news who had to ask nasa that kind of stuff it was people from the today show and cbs mornings or whatever right all of the the premier premier gen pop journalism that's out there,

it got into those circles and people started talking about, oh, you know, Russia's threatening to deorbit the ISS. People that hadn't thought about that ever, maybe, or talking about it all of a sudden. So that certainly ramped up the tension and made it a lot harder for the people that work at NASA and the people that work at Roscosmos, not the political appointees, but the actual people that are trying to fly the space station. It made it a lot harder for them to do their job because they were dragged into the limelight all the time. Borisov, right? If it's not as much public display of this tension, that's better for NASA, it's better for Roscosmos, it's better for the ISS. I think, you know, my personal opinion is we should still be rid of Russia as quickly as possible in the ISS. I think there should be a whole team at NASA that is working, you know, day and night to figure out what it is that we would need to do if Russia closed the hatch between the segments. You know, day and night to figure out what it is that we would need to do if Russia

closed the hatch between the segments. You know, where does that leave us? I think that should be a primary role of at least a couple of people in the space station program, because it's just prudent, like this, you know, we're sitting here in 2022. We want to fly the ISS to 2030. Can we do this for eight years? It's hard to say. Eight years is survivable on the trajectory that we're on. But as you know, I'm pessimistic about that. But I do think that should still be something that we are working on, regardless of what's going on in reality. I think that's a plan that we should have on the back burner, just in case, that we should have on the back burner just in case, because it just seems prudent. But if there is less public tension, if there are less opportunities for people to ask questions of

this partnership, if there are less times that this partnership is in the headlines in, you know, the big mainstream news, that is more survivable over the long haul. And I think it's something that the people of Roscosmos, the people of NASA, ESA, Canadian Space Agency, JAXA, you know, it's better for everyone at that level. So that is an improvement, if that is the case. We will see. I'm willing to give Borisov a chance to start shitposting on Twitter. But, you know, right off the bat, that is a much better situation for NASA, even if Borisov believes all the same things that Rogozin did, and even more stridently in some cases, then I still think it's an improvement overall if the public side is tamped down a little bit. All right, I want to talk about this seat exchange agreement between

NASA and Roscosmos. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 846 of you supporting the show every single month. I'm so thankful for all of you who support the show because this is entirely listener supported. As you might remember, I quit my job a couple of months back to do more of this. And that is a huge, huge influence in it, right? All these people that are supporting, it makes it a huge jump that I can make and totally makes a difference.

So I thank you all so much for that support. And this episode is produced by 41 executive producers. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, David Ashenot, Frank, Julian and Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, David Ashenot, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, and seven anonymous executive producers.

Thank you all so much for making this episode possible. You can put this on your LinkedIn. Say that you were the executive producer of Miko. I'll totally back you up on it. It's a 100% legitimate thing. So do that, flaunt it, because I'm super appreciative of it. And if you want to help join that crew, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join up there at any level. If you are at the $3 a month or more level, you get access to Miko Headlines, which is a show I do every single week, run through all the stories of the week, the ones that don't make it onto the main show, some of the ones that do, give you my thoughts

on everything, keep you up to date on all the launches that are happening. It's a great way to stay up on all the space news that's happening out there. Let me do the work for you and help support the show. Get more of me in your ears if that's the kind of thing that you like, which if you're listening to this, you probably do. So head over there and do that. And I am super thankful once again. All right. So this seed exchange agreement that NASA and Roscosmos have officially agreed to has been in the works for a really long time. You know, so going back, right, we had the shuttle program for a long time. When the shuttle ended, the Roscosmos flights were the only way to the ISS. So NASA and all the partner agencies,

right? I keep saying NASA and the partner agencies. Anytime I say NASA in reference to the ISS, it probably just means NASA, European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and any other partners that have a piece of the action here. We were paying exorbitant amounts of money for those seats on Soyuz, right? We would buy for like, it started around $60 million. It ended up around $90 million per seat to fly to the ISS. Commercial crew was coming online. And when that was envisioned, once it was operational, a thing that NASA and Roscosmos had talked about for a long time was trading crew members without trading money, right?

We're not paying them. They're not paying us. We would trade a seat on each of these flights so that a member of the crew for each side of the space station, right? Because there's the US orbital segment and the Russian orbital segment. They are two different orbital segments attached in the middle. The cosmonauts work on one side. NASA and the partner agencies work on the other side. But the idea here was that a member of the crew for each segment could fly

on the other segment's spacecraft so that if there was an issue with any given spacecraft, both sides of the space station could still be operated, right? There would be a crew member on board to take care of that segment of the space station. So if Soyuz has an issue, Dragon's still flying, they can still get cosmonauts up to the Russian orbital segment, vice versa, right? If there's commercial crew issues, which honestly was, I think, where the impetus came for this was NASA knowing that, yeah, you know, this is a new thing. There's probably going to be an issue here or there. There's going to be long groundings of spacecraft as we're investigating issues or, you know, checking things off or, you know, in is a new thing. There's probably going to be an issue here or there. There's going to be long groundings of spacecraft as we're investigating issues or, you know, checking things off. Or,

you know, in this case, development delays where Dragon was online a couple of years later than we wanted and Starliner many years later than we wanted. So I think originally it started out as a way for NASA to protect their capability to get to the ISS, but still promise some flights to Roscosmos on the back end. So that's the general motivation behind this. It had been talked about for a while, but there was resistance. And I think a lot of people put this at the feet of Dmitry Rogozin. There was resistance to signing this agreement because, you know, us not paying that amount of money for Soyuz seats anymore was a big hit to the funding of the Russian space program. If you looked at their annual budgets, a shockingly large percentage of

that is what we were paying for Soyuz flights over the tenure that we were paying for Soyuz flights. So commercial crew coming online and taking away that funding, that income, it was a big hit to the Russian space program. So there were certain things going on internally that put some sand in the gears here and made this agreement much harder to sign than I think a lot of people thought it would be. NASA's even behind schedule on what they want it to be to start crew flights with cosmonauts on board as soon as they hope to. But, you know, a month or so over the deadline here, they finally did sign it. So the agreement here covers four upcoming missions to the ISS. I'm unsure exactly if this agreement extends beyond that, and we just haven't figured out the manifest yet, or if this is only

for these four flights. And at that point, we'll reassess. We'll talk about the future stuff in a second. So the basic agreement covers, uh, two NASA astronauts on board the next two Soyuz missions. So Soyuz MS-22, which is scheduled to launch in September, I think September 21st, and Soyuz MS-23 in next spring. There will be NASA astronauts on board that alongside two cosmonauts on each flight. And then, uh, starting in September, that alongside two cosmonauts on each flight. And then starting in September, cosmonaut Anna Kikina, I don't know exactly how to pronounce her name. I probably should look that up. She'll be flying on crew five alongside NASA astronauts, Nicole Mann, Joss Kersada, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata. They're going to be taken off in September on a dragon. So

she'll be joining the crew there. And then a cosmonaut will also be on board a crew six that'll fly next spring. So this covers us basically, if you figure these are both six months flights, or these are all our six month flights, that those flights next spring cover us until fall 2023. Now, if the agreement extends beyond that, I assume it would be I assume we wouldn't have to rework it at that point. But by the end of that agreement, Starliner should be online as well. So NASA wanting two ways to get to the space station, ideally, they would have three once Starliner is operational. Maybe in a world where Starliner is operational, Dragon's operational, this becomes less important from the NASA side of things, And the next agreement looks different. Who knows where we'll be at that point, right? Starliner's next flight is supposed to have

people on board. It looks like at the end of this year, right now, operational sometime next year, you know, maybe that fall flight next year, 2023, is the first operational Starliner mission. So things could be different by that time. And we'll see exactly how much this agreement covers. Now, one thing that I've been thinking about as I've been kicking this around my head, that hadn't really occurred to me before. And this might just be all of the context that we have now with where Russia's space agency is at and space industry is at, where commercial crew is at. Just changed my thinking on this a little bit. But, you know, as I said, this was always something that was in NASA's interest to sign because they wanted to assure that they could get to the space station if and

when we had problems with commercial crew. Now, the stance of the ISS program is that crew is necessary to fly the ISS and crew is necessary on both halves of the ISS to keep the ISS flying, and both halves of the ISS are required to keep the ISS flying. So if you're in a world where the Russian industry is in serious trouble, which it has been for several years, right? There's, I mean, rampant problems in the industry with like people going unpaid, not to mention the reliability problems that there have been of Russian hardware and software over the last several years. And we can just recap real quick. The Zvezda module in the ISS is leaking right now,

we don't really know where or why, and they keep this one hatch closed all the time to limit the leaking to just the one part of the hatch where it is. But that's indicative of a bigger problem internally for a very old module. There were all those Soyuz issues that happened a couple years back. So there was that hole drilled in the Soyuz that I mentioned, that somebody plugged with something very temporary that eventually popped out and there was a leak on board the space station. Around the same time, there was that in-flight abort where one of the boosters on the Soyuz rocket was forced in. Uh, and when they went to separate, Korea had an issue and they had to have this in-flight abort,

uh, and not actually get to space. And that was definitely an incident that if that kind of thing happened here in the U S we would be grounded for much longer than they were over on the Soyuz program. But that was a major issue. And, you know, there's other things that happen like every time that not every time, but most times that there's a vehicle coming into dock at the ISS on the Russian side, automated docking goes a little haywire and they come in manually. That's happened a lot. So there's this series of problems in the Russian space industry. There's all this reporting about how the industry is failing even beyond those things. And I started realizing that if NASA's official stance is that they always want a cosmonaut on board the space station to take care of that half of the space station that's required

for its operation, we're at an inflection point where this agreement is almost defensive in nature for NASA, where they might just keep saying, yeah, we're just going to fly a cosmonaut on board a commercial crew flight, you know, as long as things remain as they are right now, to ensure that cosmonauts are on the other half of the space station, because we're not super confident in the Russian space industry. Now, I'm not saying I know that this is a thinking internally, but I'm realizing that we are at the inflection point in the industry where that thinking is going to be more prominent than the thinking of NASA is protecting itself in case its own vehicles have issues. Because like I said, once Starliner's flying, we've got Dragon and Starliner

that can fly to the space station. The chances that both are having issues at the same time, it's not small, right? That's definitely a thing that could happen. But the frequency of flights to the ISS being every six months, it does limit the exposure there if you do have these two providers. And that's why they wanted two providers in the first place. They wanted that competitive nature on the development side of things and the budgeting side of things. But they also wanted to have that redundancy when they're in operations. So when we're in that world, the risk is less and the highest risk to the ISS then becomes a failing Russian space

industry not able to keep cosmonauts on the station in the way that they need to to maintain the ISS. And, you know, it's totally plausible that NASA could be in this defensive position to say, you know, this agreement is beneficial to us, not because of our astronauts flying on Soyuz, but because of the cosmonauts flying on our vehicles. Now for the NASA, ESA, Canadian astronauts that have to go fly on soyuz that kind of sucks you know i've definitely had jobs where i was the one stuck on a spirit airlines flight and i feel like that's a little bit how it feels to get sent over uh and fly on a soyuz um but you know they're astronauts they can deal with it one other bit of this though that is that is concerning is it's not only been tension between the US and Russia in terms of, they leased that land at Baikonur Cosmodrome to Russia.

So that's where their primary spaceport is, is in Kazakhstan. They're a huge oil producer. They're important strategically for Russia, geographically. And there's, you know, there's a lot of ties there. know, there's a lot of ties there. But when the Ukrainian invasion happened, Kazakhstan did not come to the support of Russia, and they were criticizing them publicly. And since then, the tensions have been rising. There's been disputes over oil pipelines and flights, and there's been an outspoken Kazakhstan in the face of pressure from Russia. And that's a huge risk. You know, that's a huge risk for Russia because Baikonur is the way that they get to the ISS. And, you know,

is it a pretty extreme scenario in which they no longer have access to Baikonur-Kazimdor? Yeah, that would be a pretty extreme scenario. Is it completely implausible? Definitely not, given where we're at in the world. Definitely not implausible. So again, if you're NASA, and you want to be a little defensive about keeping cosmonauts on the space station, and you see not only the space industry in Russia having these reliability problems, but then tensions rising between the home of their spaceport and themselves, you know, it's not the worst idea in the world to, you know, keep this kind of defensive option open if you're worried about the collision of all those things. And certainly is something that needs to be considered from all angles here.

But once again, I will restate my firm position that somebody within the ISS program in NASA and the partner agencies needs to be working on a, what is our plan if everything falls out between us and Russia more so than it already has, and we have to figure out how to make the ISS go on with hatches closed or with, you know, worse, the Russian orbital segment detached from the US orbital segment. We need to be working on some sort of backup plan just in case because eight years is a really long time with how things are going today um so we'll see maybe the borosov era of roscosmos will uh quell the

tensions a little bit but that might be a bit too hopeful for my liking so we will see where this all goes but uh thanks for listening as always if you've got any questions or thoughts, which I'm sure there'll be many of after this show, hit me up on email anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. Thanks again to everyone who supports over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And until next time, thanks again for listening. I will talk to you soon. Bye.