Why Was Gagarin ‘Cancelled’?

The Russian-Ukranian war and the consequent resurgence of the Cold War has hit space diplomacy between the US and Russia.

My readers at Science India will be familiar with a recent social media phenomenon called ‘Cancellation.’ It is nothing but contempt or boycott of entities and individuals en masse if these do not tow the popular line in the 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.

Space Foundation is a well-regarded US-based not-for-profit platform bringing together academia, industry, and agencies. Given the US’ prowess in space and as a media power, the Space Foundation has made a tremendous impact internationally. Since 12 April 2001, the not-for-profit has organised an all-volunteer Yuri’s Night or the World Space Party, to commemorate Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight that took place on the same day in 1961. In these 20 years, the celebration has been hosted across 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 in 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 then 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. After the unfortunate accident of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, when the space shuttle’s retirement was being contemplated, the US had to depend on the Soyuz for ferrying their 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 the 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 pacific as possible. Although the Russian economy was weak, post the Soviet dissolution, it had an upper edge 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 RD-180 is unmatchable, and it is here to advantage Russia.

Impact of 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 put out a counter sanction by stopping 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 raising a commercial space station built 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 point of view, 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 than 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 and countless others like me celebrated the achievements of great space-farers, including Neil Armstrong, Edward Dwight, Sunita Williams, Kalpana Chawla, and Valentina Tereshkova, not for their nationalities but for their achievements 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 and 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 erase great science from records deliberately. The space diplomacy between the US and Russia is looking south.

This blog was published in the April 2022 edition of Science India magazine published by Vijnana Bharati.