A NASA astronaut rode a Russian rocket to orbit today — while the two countries barely speak on Earth

Space 5 min 80 sources

Anil Menon launched to the space station on a Russian Soyuz this morning, a reminder that in orbit the US and Russia still keep each other alive — even as NASA drafts the rules for the private stations that will end the arrangement.

Key takeaways

A NASA astronaut launched to the space station on a Russian rocket today, a reminder that the US and Russia still jointly run one machine in orbit even as they clash on Earth.
That shared station retires around 2030, and NASA this week drafted the rules for the private, national stations meant to replace it — ending the arrangement that forced two rivals to cooperate.
Reusable rockets are spreading: SpaceX flew one booster a record 36th time, and China recovered an orbital-class booster for the first time, openly aiming to break US dominance.

The last shared machine in the sky

This morning a NASA astronaut climbed into a Russian rocket. Anil Menon lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday at 10:47 a.m. EDT, riding a Soyuz spacecraft alongside cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina. [8] The three took a fast route up, docking with the International Space Station after just two orbits, and joined the seven people already living aboard. [8]

There is nothing routine about the geopolitics packed into that sentence. On the ground, Washington and Moscow are about as far apart as two capitals get. Two hundred and sixty miles up, they run a single machine together. [58] The ISS was built as two halves — a US-led segment with the labs and most of the power, and a Russian segment whose engines supply the gentle push that keeps the whole thing from slowly sinking back into the atmosphere. Neither side can operate the station alone. That is not an accident, and it is the thread running through this week’s news.

An arrangement with an expiry date

NASA has set 2030 as the retirement date for the ISS, with a likely two-year extension. [58] This week the agency released a draft “request for proposals” — the document that tells private companies what NASA wants — for commercial space stations to replace it. [58] The agency says it intends to fund at least two builders through early development, then hold a later competition for a final design. [74]

The back-and-forth behind that document matters. This spring NASA floated pulling away from standalone commercial stations, arguing the market wasn’t strong enough to sustain them. [74] Industry pushed back hard, insisting the money and demand were there; NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said no final decision had been made and told companies to prove him wrong. [74] They apparently did — hence this week’s draft. Nearly five years ago NASA seeded three companies with concept awards and gave $140 million to Axiom Space; this is the step toward actually building. [58]

Read together, the crew launch and the RFP are one story. The era of one shared station is ending, and a more independent, more commercial, more national era is being drafted to take its place.

The reusability race gets a second runner

The economics of all this rest on cheap launch, and cheap launch means flying the same rocket twice. Last week SpaceX flew a single Falcon 9 booster for a record-breaking 36th time, carrying 29 Starlink internet satellites to orbit. [7] That booster, numbered 1067, has now flown more than any rocket in history bar NASA’s Space Shuttle orbiters, which reached 39 flights. [7] It was SpaceX’s 80th launch of the year, and roughly four in five of those have been building out Starlink — already more than 10,700 working satellites. [7]

For years, reusing an orbital rocket was something only SpaceX did. This week China closed the gap. On Friday a Long March 10B booster lifted off from Hainan, separated, and returned to land upright on a platform at sea — the country’s first successful recovery of an orbital-class rocket. [52] State media were blunt about the goal: breaking US dominance in reusable rockets. [52] The booster can carry at least 16 tonnes to low orbit. [52]

SpaceX, meanwhile, is pressing on with the rocket meant to make everything above look small. Starship Flight 13 is set for no earlier than Thursday, the second flight of the bigger “Version 3” design. [6] The company says the last flight didn’t tick every box, so this one largely re-attempts the same goals. [6] Starship is built for full reusability, with both stages meant to return to the launch tower and be caught mid-air by mechanical arms — a catch SpaceX has managed with the booster three times but never yet with the upper stage. [6]

The money follows

The clearest read on where the industry thinks it’s heading came from Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company is reportedly opening to outside investment for the first time, seeking $10 billion at a $130 billion valuation. [39] The round would include $2 billion from Bezos himself, $4 billion from investment firm Coatue, and $4 billion from other institutions. [39] It follows a pad anomaly this spring that damaged the company’s New Glenn rocket, though Blue Origin still aims to launch again before year’s end. [39] For a project long paid for out of one man’s fortune, taking outside money is a milestone in itself — a bet that the market NASA is drafting for is real.

The under-covered one: a photo of a rock that shadows Earth

Far from the launch pads, China’s Tianwen-2 probe — the country’s first asteroid-sampling mission — sent home the first close picture of its target. [10] The rock is called Kamo’oalewa, a “quasi-moon”: a small body that circles the Sun on a path that keeps it near Earth without ever truly orbiting us. [10] The probe travelled 620 million miles to reach a point about 12 miles from the asteroid and photographed it on July 2. [10] Kamo’oalewa is tiny — roughly 16 to 20 metres across, the size of a large house. [10]

Here’s the part worth holding. A 2024 study suggested Kamo’oalewa might be a chip of our own Moon, thrown off by an impact somewhere between 1 and 10 million years ago. [10] Tianwen-2 will study it for nearly a year with 11 instruments, then try to grab a sample and send it home — which could finally settle whether a piece of the Moon has been quietly trailing Earth this whole time. [10]

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why rivals who share a machine keep each other alive

Cooperation between enemies is usually built by need, not goodwill — and it lasts exactly as long as the need does.

A NASA astronaut in a Russian seat

This morning an American strapped himself into a Russian rocket and trusted it with his life. His two crewmates were Russian, and they were flying up to a station whose other half is run by Americans. On the ground, their governments barely speak. Above it, they are colleagues who cannot afford to be anything else.

It’s easy to read that as a nice story about people rising above politics. It isn’t, quite. Look closer and the cooperation is not a triumph of good feeling. It is a piece of machinery.

The trust is in the wiring, not the hearts

The station is one machine split down the middle. The American side holds the labs and most of the power. The Russian side holds the engines that keep the whole thing from drifting down into the atmosphere. Pull either half out and the station dies.

So “cooperation” here doesn’t mean the two sides like each other. It means each is holding a rope the other is hanging from. Neither can let go without falling too. The trust you see isn’t a feeling anyone had to summon. It’s the shape of the wiring.

Need makes rivals behave like friends

This is how most cooperation between adversaries actually begins. Not with a change of heart — with a shared stake neither one can walk away from.

Two countries that trade too much to risk a war. A bitter couple who stay civil because they share a mortgage and a child. Neighbours who share a single well and so, whatever they think of each other, agree on how it gets used. In every case the behaviour of trust appears wherever the cost of betrayal lands hard on the betrayer too. Name that pattern and you start seeing it everywhere. A great deal of the peace around you is not affection. It is people who need each other.

Someone built the dependence on purpose

The interdependence up there was designed. When the station was assembled, no single nation was left holding all the essential pieces. The split was deliberate — a way to bolt rivals to the same outcome, so that quitting would hurt everyone at once.

The seat-swap you watched today is the same logic made routine: put each side’s people on the other’s vehicles, so neither can strand the other without stranding itself. It looks like a friendly crew rotation. It works more like a carefully balanced set of hostages. And it has held through years when almost nothing else between these two countries did.

And now the need is being dissolved

Here is what the rest of this week’s news means. The shared station is being wound down, and what comes next is separate — American commercial stations, other nations building their own. The whole point of the new era is that each side won’t need the other’s half anymore.

That is the quiet risk hiding inside the progress. The cooperation in orbit was never held up by goodwill; it was held up by need. Remove the need — give each rival its own way to stay in space — and you remove the reason to keep the peace along with it. Abundance can dissolve the very trust that scarcity forced into being.

What holds you is also what holds you together

We tend to admire independence — standing on your own, needing no one. But the same independence that frees you from a rival also frees you from the one reason you were careful with them.

The station overhead is a small, honest model of a larger truth. A lot of the peace we live inside rests not on people liking each other, but on their being unable to afford the alternative. You sit inside webs like that too — at your work, on your street, between the countries whose goods fill your home — mostly without noticing, and no single seat in any of them can see how much of its safety it owes to plain, unglamorous need. When those threads loosen, they rarely announce it. That is a reason to hold your certainties about who needs whom a little more loosely.

03 · Lab · your turn

The Shared Machine

Rehearse how the payoff of walking away from a rival flips as your need for them fades.

04 · Hope · carry this

For twenty-five years, two countries that could agree on almost nothing still kept each other's people breathing in a metal can 260 miles up. When humans genuinely need each other, they build a way to work together that outlasts nearly every reason not to.