The new head of the Russian space agency announced on Tuesday that Russia will leave the International Space Station after its current commitment expires at the end of 2024.
“The decision to abandon the station after 2024 has been made,” said Yuri Borisov, who was appointed this month to head Roscosmos, a state-controlled corporation in charge of the country’s space program.
The pronouncement occurred during a meeting between Mr. Borisov and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Borisov told Putin that Russia would meet its commitments until 2024. “I think at that time we will start forming the Russian orbital station,” he said.
“This could be bluster by the Russians,” said Phil Larson, a White House space adviser during the Obama administration. “It could be revised or it could come to fruition.”
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NASA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Speaking from orbit at a conference on space station research, Kjell Lindgren, one of NASA’s astronauts, said nothing had changed up there yet.
“It’s very recent news,” he said, “and so we haven’t heard anything officially. Of course, you know, we were trained for a mission up here, and that mission is one that requires the entire crew.” .
It is not known whether the station can operate without Russia’s involvement after 2024. The orbiting outpost consists of two sections, one run by NASA and the other by Russia. The two are interconnected. Much of the power on the Russian side comes from NASA’s solar panels, while the Russians provide propulsion to raise the orbit periodically.
But with tensions rising between Washington and Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Russian space officials, including Dmitri Rogozin, Mr. Borisov, had made statements in recent months that Russia planned to leave. But they left unclear when or if a final decision had been made. NASA officials, who want to extend the space station’s operations until 2030, have expressed confidence that Russia will stick around.
For the most part, operations on the space station have continued without interruption. In March, Mark Vande Hei, a NASA astronaut, returned to Earth in a Russian Soyuz capsule as planned. NASA and Roscomos just finalized a deal that would give Russian astronauts seats on American-built spacecraft in exchange for NASA astronauts reaching orbit on Russian Soyuz rockets.
However, NASA this month sharply criticized Russia after Roscosmos distributed photographs of the three Russian astronauts on the space station holding the flags of Russian-backed separatists in two Ukrainian provinces.
Russia has plans for its own space station, but Roscosmos has been financially strapped for years. After the retirement of the US space shuttles in 2011, NASA had to buy seats on Soyuz rockets, providing a steady flow of money to the Russians. That revenue dried up after SpaceX began providing transportation to NASA astronauts two years ago. Russia lost additional sources of revenue as a result of economic sanctions that prevented European and other nations’ companies from launching satellites on their rockets.
“Without cooperation with the West, the Russian space program is impossible in all its parts, including the military,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian military and space analyst.
Russia is also looking to cooperate more with China’s space program, which on Sunday launched a laboratory module to add to its Tiangong space station. But Tiangong is not in an orbit that can be reached from Russia’s launch pads.
“The prospect of cooperating with China is a fiction,” Luzin said. “The Chinese have seen Russia as a potential partner until 2012 and have stopped since then. Today, Russia cannot offer China anything in terms of space.”