![Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev, and Sergey Korsakov pose with a flag of the Luhansk People's Republic on the International Space Station.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Clipboard01-800x532.jpg)
Roscosmos
A latest report within the Financial Times appears to verify that the principal Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, is recruiting and training a militia to hitch the country’s war effort against Ukraine.
The “Uran” battalion, which translates to Uranus, is to be made up of employees of Roscosmos, in addition to those from its dozens of state-owned subsidiaries within the aerospace business. Recruits will receive a 100,000 ruble ($1,200) sign-up bonus, and a monthly frontline duty salary of 270,000 rubles, in response to the report. This is much above the wages paid to most employees of Roscosmos.
Among the many recruitment efforts are glossy posters, showing soldiers Photoshopped next to space vehicles, and videos that aggrandize participation within the war. In one in all these advertisements, the announcer states, “State corporation Roscosmos calls on you to hitch the Uran volunteer battalion, where you will probably be trained for victory on this great war.” The report indicates that these recruitment videos are playing within the facilities of some Roscosmos entities, where there are 170,000 employees spread across Russia.
The recruitment campaign is an effort to bolster Russia’s military forces, which have been bogged down right into a less-than-successful invasion of Ukraine for the last 16 months. The Russian government doesn’t wish to conduct a draft of its residents, which might be disastrous to public morale. Moderately, with this effort by Roscosmos and other state corporations, comparable to Gazprom, the Russian government appears to be attempting to influence its residents to hitch the military, fairly than compel them.
Comfortable with Krikalev
Roscosmos has not publicly acknowledged the recruitment effort, and this might be since the space corporation has been largely exempted from sanctions imposed by the West on other Russian industries following the invasion of Ukraine. In the course of the war, Roscosmos has maintained close contact with NASA and the European Space Agency within the operation of the International Space Station.
As a part of this cooperation Americans fly on Russian vehicles, and Russians on NASA-sponsored vehicles, and engineers on the space agencies work closely together on day-to-day operations. Last Friday, for instance, NASA announced that Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov will fly as a mission specialist on SpaceX’s seventh mission to the space station in August.
Despite the acts of war and terrorism by Russia, the Roscosmos-NASA relationship has remained strong over the past 12 months, because the belligerent former leader of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, was fired from his post. NASA officials are especially comfortable with Sergei Krikalev, a former cosmonaut who oversees crew operations at Roscosmos. Particularly, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Cabana, who commanded a Space Shuttle mission that Krikalev flew aboard in 1998, has worked to maintain relations warm.
Other former NASA astronauts are less comfortable with the continuing cooperation. Terry Virts, who flew aboard the shuttle as a pilot in 2010, and later launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2015 and served as commander of the space station, said the orbiting outpost now not serves as a beacon of peace.
“It’s naïve to think that cooperation on the ISS will in some way allow cooler heads in Moscow to prevail, or provide some sort of restraint to Putin,” he told Ars. “Three cosmonauts that I flew with in space went to the Duma where all of them supported Putin’s illegal war, in addition to repressive measures which have eliminated the last vestiges of free speech for unusual Russians.”
End the exemption?
Virts, and other former NASA astronauts including Scott Kelly, have been outspoken about Russia’s actions within the war. Now, Virts said, the direct intervention of Roscosmos should push NASA to a breaking point in its relations on the International Space Station.
“The Russian government has turn into a terrorist state, they usually are illegally attacking a peaceful, democratic European nation and ally of the USA and EU,” he said. “They’re killing Ukrainian civilians each day,” he said. “The Russian space agency is now directly supporting the war effort by recruiting a ‘Uranus’ battalion, and cosmonauts on the ISS have sent greetings and well-wishes to their soldiers. All of this stuff are markers of a nation and an area agency that we must always not be cooperating with in space.”
Presently NASA and Russia jointly operate the station. The American segment of the space station provides power to the ability with its large solar arrays, whereas the Russian segment has thrusters that maintain its orbit and supply maneuverability. Virts said NASA should prioritize development of a propulsion module for the space station, perhaps by working with SpaceX to change its Dragon spacecraft, allowing the US segment to interrupt free.
To this point the US Congress has allowed NASA to proceed operating with Roscosmos. And NASA has, with a single exception, remained silent about Roscosmos’ involvement within the war effort. Nonetheless, one senior space official told Ars that if the involvement by Roscosmos in recruiting soldiers were confirmed by the US government, questions were prone to be asked about why the space station is exempted from sanctions.
“This may not play well on the Hill, nor should it,” the official told Ars. “The response from the Europeans could also be impactful as well.”