Russian space agency chief threatens to leave U.S. astronaut on space station

The fate of a U.S. astronaut remains uncertain after the head of Russia’s space agency threatened to abandon him on the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei was scheduled to land in Kazakhstan with two Russian cosmonauts aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 30, 2022. But a Feb. 26 video from Russian space agency director Dmitry Rogozin called that into question, when he threatened to leave Vande Hei in space and even separate Russian and American parts of the orbiting lab.

Rogozin was responding to comments from U.S. President Joe Biden, who on Feb. 24 said sanctions against Russia will “degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,” which is known as Roscosmos. In a March 5 social media post, a state-owned Russian news agency described Rogozin’s retort as a joke.

The threats from the staunch Putin ally come alongside a steady stream of social media outbursts since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Rogozin’s Telegram and Twitter pages are rife with disinformation and state propaganda, and he has also apparently threatened to send the ISS crashing into the U.S., Europe, India and China.

After posting a video of workers removing U.S. and Japanese flags from a Russian rocket, Rogozin even sparked an online spat with former U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly, who replied, “without those flags and the foreign exchange they bring in, your space program won't be worth a damn.”