The Chill of U.S.-Russia Relations Creeps Into Space

Updated at 11:35 a.m. ET on January 11.

On the afternoon of the failed launch, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and Dmitry Rogozin of Roscosmos had only known each other for a few days. Less than one mile from the launchpad, the heads of the American and Russian space agencies watched as the Soyuz system lofted the crew, one man from each country, into the blue sky over Kazakhstan.

But then, inside the crew capsule, alarms blared and emergency lights flashed. Instead of climbing into space, the capsule began to plunge back to Earth. In those stressful moments—before the capsule parachuted gently to the ground, before rescue crews arrived, before the would-be space travelers reunited with their family—each official considered what he might say if the failed launch ended in tragedy.

“If we’re going to strengthen the partnership with the United States and Russia on space exploration, I think this was probably one way to do it,” Bridenstine later, after he had returned to the United States. “Everybody became a