NASA officially Calls on SpaceX Dragon to Go for Launch while Russia Soyuz Trouble...

Rosscosmos once mocked the US telling us to use a trampoline to reach the ISS. But today, with Soyos grounded after serious damage at the Bikonor launchpad, Russia has quietly found itself needing NASA's help. What's even more surprising, NASA didn't retaliate. Instead, it stepped in, ramping up cargo Dragon missions to keep supplies flowing and the Russian segment of the ISS running. So, why choose cooperation over payback? And could Russia use this crisis as a chance to leave the ISS earlier than planned? Let's find out in today's episode of AlphaTech. Nearly a month has passed since November 27th, 2025, the day Roscosmos suffered a major setback. Launch site 31 at the Bikonor Cosmo Drrome, the only facility capable of sending the Soyu spacecraft to the ISS was seriously damaged. In the immediate aftermath, Roscosmos projected confidence. Officials insisted repairs would move quickly, saying replacement components were already on hand. Deputy Director Dimmitri Baranov claimed the full repair kit had arrived. That work would begin on December 1st, 2025, and that the pad could be operational again as early as late February, 2026. But as weeks have gone by, progress has become increasingly opaque. There have been no meaningful updates, no public indications that repairs are advancing as planned. Many experts and media outlets now believe the disruption could last far longer, potentially extending to 2 years, and that changes everything. For up to 2 years, Russia may be unable to launch Soyu's crew vehicles or Progress cargo ships to the ISS at all. That means operations on the Russian side of the station would be forced to rely almost entirely on NASA. Of course, Russia never formally asked NASA for help. Instead, NASA moved preemptively to hedge against delays in Russia's Progress cargo flights. NASA pulled forward two upcoming SpaceX cargo Dragon missions. CRS34 was moved from June to May 2026 and CRS35 from November to August 2026. These flights are meant to compensate for delayed cargo deliveries and the loss of progress vehicles that normally help reboost the ISS's orbit. More recently, NASA also announced the crew lineup for SpaceX's Crew 12 mission under the commercial crew program, a crew rotation that operates independently of Soyos. The mission is scheduled to launch in February 2026 and notably includes Russian cosminaut Andre Fedy, who previously flew on Crew 6 in 2023. His seat is part of the ongoing crossflight agreement between NASA and Ross Cosmos. SpaceX confirmed the mission on X, saying, "We're excited to train NASA's crew 12 and looking forward to Falcon 9, launching the crew aboard Dragon to the space station in February 2026. Under the current cross-flight arrangement, Russia is allocated just one ride share seat aboard crew dragon permission. But with launch site 316 at Bikonor severely damaged, Roscosmos cannot conduct independent Soyuse flights in the near term. That creates a situation where Russian crew rotations are indirectly dependent on US missions. If the delays continue, Russia may be forced to renegotiate the agreement, potentially expanding the number of Dragon Seats per mission instead of limiting it to one simply to maintain uninterrupted cosminaut rotations aboard the ISS. There is also the question of crew return. So traditionally lands in Kazakhstan, territory controlled by Russia, while crew dragon splashes down off the coast of Florida or in the Pacific. That means Russian cosminauts flying on Dragon would return to the US first, then travel back to Russia by conventional means, not land directly on Russian controlled soil. One possible outcome is that Russia could seek to purchase a dedicated Crew Dragon flight to carry an entire Russian crew, setting aside years of political tension. The real unknown is whether SpaceX would agree. And if it does, whether ticket prices might suddenly rise three or four times higher, just as Roscosmos once did when NASA had no other choice. And here's the irony. It's hard not to remember how differently Roscosmos once treated NASA. After the US space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA became fully dependent on Russia's Soyos to send astronauts to the ISS. That dependency gave Roscosmos enormous leverage. Seat prices on Soyos jumped from around $20 million per astronaut to roughly 50 to 70 million per seat and Russia made a fortune from it. Then came 2014 as tensions between the US and Russia escalated following the annexation of Crimea. Washington imposed sanctions on several Russian officials, including Dmitri Roggozen, who at the time was deputy prime minister and the man overseeing Russia's space industry. Angered by the sanctions, Roggozen fired off a tweet that would go down in spaceflight history. He suggested that instead of relying on Russia, the United States should send its astronauts to the ISS using a trampoline. The remark went viral instantly. The world laughed partly because it was outrageous and partly because it sounded so confident, even arrogant. Elon Musk, who was quietly developing Crew Dragon with NASA at the time, responded with a calm but pointed reply. Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon. EMC2 spacecraft SpaceX has been working on with NASA. No trampoline needed. Back then, it sounded like nothing more than a witty comeback. But just 6 years later, in late May 2020, SpaceX successfully launched Crew Dragon with two NASA astronauts to the ISS from US soil. It marked the end of 9 years of American dependence on Russia. After the historic press conference, Elon Musk smiled and said, "The trampoline is working." It almost felt like the space cold war was finally over, but it wasn't. Space cooperation between the US and Russia soon drifted even further apart. In 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Moscow was hit with sweeping sanctions from the United States and the West. In response, Dmitri Rogozen announced that Russia would stop selling its RD 180 and RD 181 rocket engines to the US. He even went on Russian state television and declared, "Under these conditions, we cannot supply the United States with the world's best rocket engines anymore. Let them fly on something else. On broomsticks for all I care. What Rogoen either ignored or failed to realize was that by then SpaceX didn't rely on Russian engines at all. Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon were already flying on fully Americanbuilt hardware. Elon Musk wasted no time. He reposted a Falcon 9 launch video and captioned it simply, "American broomstick." Rogos in meed as an insult aimed at the US space program. SpaceX turned it into a patriotic flex. And now look at where things stand. What began as jokes about trampolines and broomsticks didn't just end NASA's reliance on soyos. Today, SpaceX's Dragon has become so capable that even Rosscosmos finds itself depending on it to keep crew access to the ISS alive. History has a strange sense of humor, but this raises a puzzling question. Given their troubled history, why is NASA still willing to help Russia so actively? From 2019 to 2025, cooperation on ISS operations never fully stopped. Crossflights continued. Seats were exchanged between Dragon and Syos and day-to-day coordination carried on. However, highlevel in-person leadership meetings were completely frozen, largely due to geopolitical tensions stemming from Crimea in 2014 and then escalating sharply after 2022. That changed on July 31st, 2025 when Rosscosmos head Dmitri Bachenov met face-toface with NASA acting administrator Sha Duffy at Kennedy Space Center. It was the first direct top level meeting in nearly 7 years. The discussions focused on extending the crossflight agreement, continuing ISS operations through 2030, and potential areas of future cooperation. The reason cooperation continues is not because NASA is being generous or forgiving. It's because cooperation is unavoidable and strategic. First, the ISS is a deeply interdependent system. The 150 billion dollar station was deliberately designed so that no single partner can operate it alone. Russia plays a critical role in propulsion, reboosting the station's orbit, avoiding space debris, and helping control attitude. Without sustained Russian support, the ISS risks orbital decay or loss of control. At the same time, the US and its partners provide the majority of the station's power and life support systems. If the ISS is to survive until 2030, as currently planned, cooperation is mandatory. Helping Russia in this context is not altruism, it's self-preservation. That's why NASA accelerated cargo dragon missions to compensate when Russia couldn't launch Progress resupply vehicles. A food or propellant shortfall on the Russian segment wouldn't just be Russia's problem. it would threaten the entire station. Second, this cooperation is already built into the cross-flight agreements. If one partner encounters a failure, such as damage to a Soyuse launchpad, the other steps in to prevent disruption. This redundancy has proven essential before. It helped keep the ISS alive after the Colombia disaster in 2003. So, even if SpaceX or Elon Musk personally had no desire to fly Russian cosminauts, they couldn't simply opt out. These arrangements are binding, institutional, and designed to protect the station above all else. Third, the ISS is the world's largest symbol of international cooperation in space. It has produced thousands of scientific and technological experiments that benefit not just the US and Russia, but humanity as a whole. Allowing political grudges to derail its operation would undermine the very purpose the station was built for. And there's another strategic reality. Pushing Russia entirely away risks driving it closer to China. In the long run, that could reshape the global balance of power in space, and the United States would be hardpressed to carry that competition alone. So, after all of this, Russia clearly cannot rely on the United States forever. The question is, could Moscow use this moment as an opportunity to withdraw from the ISS earlier than planned? The short answer is no. Russia is very unlikely to leave the ISS earlier than planned. As we just discussed, the ISS is a deeply interdependent system. Without Russia, the US would need to deploy additional astronauts and retrain crews to take over operations that are still handled by the Russian segment. That alone makes an early breakup highly impractical. More importantly, Russia is still clearly trying to fix the Soyuse launch pad. While Roscosmos has stayed quiet about repair progress, reports indicate that more than 130 workers have been assigned to roundthe-clock shifts at Bikonor. If Russia truly intended to abandon the ISS, it wouldn't be pouring manpower into repairs. It would be building new infrastructure dedicated solely to its future station instead. And that future station, the Russian Orbital Service Station, or Ross, is another key reason an early exit makes little sense. Announced back in 2022, Ross is expected to launch its first module no earlier than 2027 or 2028 with full completion pushed into the early 2030s. Even then, the project remains largely on paper, slowed by budget constraints and unresolved technical challenges. Leaving the ISS too soon would create a dangerous gap. Russia would lose years of operational experience in long duration the space flight. experience that could otherwise be used to train new cosminauts ahead of Ross. That would significantly weaken Russia's position in orbit, especially at a time when China is already operating the fully functional Tangong space