Why Was Gagarin ‘Cancelled’?
The Russian-Ukrainian war and the consequent resurgence of the Cold War have hit space diplomacy between the US and Russia.
My readers at Science India will be familiar with a recent social media phenomenon known as ‘cancellation.’ It is nothing but contempt or boycott of entities and individuals en masse if they do not tow the popular line within a particular cohort. It takes immense analysis to judge who deserves Cancellation. Indeed, the Cancellation of Yuri Gagarin, the first human to go into space, on a Western social media circuit raised many eyebrows.
The Space Foundation is a well-regarded US-based not-for-profit organisation that brings together academia, industry, and government agencies. Given the US’s prowess in space and as a media powerhouse, the Space Foundation has made a tremendous international impact. Since 12 April 2001, the not-for-profit organisation has organised an all-volunteer Yuri’s Night or the World Space Party to commemorate Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight, which took place on the same day in 1961. Over the past 20 years, the celebration has been hosted in various countries. However, the 2022 Space Foundation Yuri’s Night was renamed “A Celebration of Space: Discover What’s Next.” The reason was the current world events.
Space Foundation is entirely within its rights to commemorate, name, and rename, celebrate whosoever and whatsoever they deem fit. However, the broader question is how deeply political can science advocacy get? And does it have an impact on science diplomacy?
Politicising Science
Firstly, the hailing and now Cancellation of Yuri Gagarin in the US is a direct measure of popular sentiment about Russia. The US-Russian relations were healthy when Yuri’s Night was announced. The two had just begun co-building the International Space Station (ISS). Between 1998 and 2001, Zarya, Zvezda, and Unity modules were launched on the Russian Proton-K rocket and the American Space Shuttle. In 2000, the first RD-180 liquid propulsion rocket engines were transferred by NPO Energomash, the Russian rocket engine company, to Pratt and Whitney, the US rocket engine company, within a limited liability partnership they created known as RD AMROSS. Following the tragic accident of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, when the shuttle’s retirement was being considered, the US had to rely on the Soyuz for ferrying its astronauts to the ISS. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos was the world’s only physical link to the ISS. Secondly, apart from the retirement of the Space Shuttle, Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s jointly built Atlas V rocket depended on Russian-supplied RD-180 engines. Those were relatively amicable years for the US-Russia partnership. One must also remember that, during the same period, the US was heavily invested in military expeditions to Afghanistan and Iraq and had to keep its relations with Russia as peaceful as possible. Although the Russian economy was weak, post the Soviet dissolution, it had an upper hand in the human spaceflight domain.
The rise of SpaceX was catalytic in reducing the growing American dependency on Russian space technologies. The Space Shuttle retired in 2011, and the first Falcon 9 carried SpaceX’s Dragon space capsule to the ISS in 2010. The first Russian-Ukrainian War in 2014 led the US to impose sanctions on Russian entities and individuals. However, it did spare NPO Energomash due to its dependency on it. The launch success rate of the RD-180 is unmatched, and it is to Russia's advantage.
Impact of the Russian-Ukrainian War
So, when the second Russian-Ukrainian War began in February 2022, amid the flurry of western sanctions on Russia, NPO Energomash was conspicuously absent from the list of sanctioned entities. This left space for Moscow to retaliate with a counter-sanction by halting the supplies of the RD-180 engine. Similarly, NPO Energomash is also contemplating cutting off RD-181 engine supplies used on the Antares rocket built by Lockheed Martin and Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye Design Office. Up next is the divorce of the Russian-American partnership on the International Space Station. Russia has already announced the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS). In contrast, the Americans are building a commercial space station, designed by the private space company Axiom Space, with logistics provided by SpaceX.
While all this was happening, Yuri Gagarin was bound to get cancelled. From the US perspective, there is no point in persuading the Russians, as both are looking to go solo with human spaceflight. With private money at play and international partnerships that the US is raising in the form of the Artemis Accords, it becomes imperative for the US to be in control of all the space systems, allow only those partners that do not have similar end-to-end space capabilities and reap benefits that it can share with junior partners. In April 2022, the first all-private astronaut crew went on the Axiom-1 mission to the ISS. Similar missions will be plying to the Axiom Space’ Orbital Reef space station in the coming years. With this, it becomes clear that the US would prefer to celebrate its astronauts over Yuri Gagarin, a cultural sign of the resurgence of the Cold War.
So, what are the lessons learned here? As a student in India, I, along with countless others like me, celebrated the achievements of great space explorers, including Neil Armstrong, Edward Dwight, Sunita Williams, Kalpana Chawla, and Valentina Tereshkova, not for their nationalities but for their accomplishments as humans. We heard the immortal words of ‘One giant step for mankind’ and took them at face value.
Gagarin’s cancellation signifies that partnership in spaceflight is a situational necessity, not an ideological and collective goal. Such partnerships are part of fluidic geopolitics, and the sooner it is realised and purported, the better it is, especially for those who celebrated Yuri’s Night gleefully.
There is no doubt that Yuri Gagarin remains a name to remember. However, his recent Cancellation shows how history is modified and omitted according to geopolitical circumstances. This Cancellation is an enormous lesson for those who study the history of science and a reminder to those who disbelieve that geopolitics can deliberately erase great science from records. The space diplomacy between the US and Russia is looking south.
The original article was published in the April 2022 edition of Science India.
