What is the plan/policy for what happens on the International space station if the US and Russia happen to go to war for some reason?
In: 10
There isn’t a plan.
In general, both countries have tried to keep politics out of the ISS, so no matter what disputes and even sanctions have been happening on the ground, both countries’ space agencies have tried to cooperate on keeping the ISS functioning.
There’s no plan for what would happen in an all-out war. It would be impossible to plan for (both countries might say today “we would of course try to keep the ISS running”, but there’s no guarantee they’d stick to that promise if ditching it could give them an advantage in this hypothetical war.
But additionally, if those two countries went to war, pretty much everything would change. Both countries have enough nukes to destroy the world several times over. If they go to war, all bets are off. Any thing might happen, including much worse things than the ISS being abandoned.
However, both countries do have plans for evacuating the ISS, and they can do so on fairly short notice.
So in practice, if either country (or both) deemed continued operation of the ISS to be too risky, they’d order their people on the station to head to the docked spacecraft and head home.
Latest Answers