Cross-flights with NASA continuing anyway

If you’ve been following the space beat for the last few years, you know the narrative. Russia invades Ukraine. Sanctions pile on. Western space companies cut ties. Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, gets painted as a pariah. Headlines scream about the end of the International Space Station partnership. Then, quietly, a Soyuz capsule docks at the ISS with an American astronaut inside. Another cross-flight mission happens. And another one is scheduled for next year. The reality is that the bureaucratic machinery of human spaceflight is grinding forward—not because anyone loves the arrangement, but because the alternative is worse.

The term “cross-flights” refers to the seat-swapping agreement between NASA and Roscosmos. Under this deal, American astronauts ride Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the station, and Russian cosmonauts launch on SpaceX Crew Dragons. This started in 2022, right as the geopolitical climate turned hostile. It was never meant to be a gesture of goodwill. It was a redundancy measure. If either side’s crew vehicle goes down—technical failure, launch anomaly, or a long-term grounding—the other side still has a way to keep American and Russian crew members on the station. That logic has not changed.

What has changed is the perception of Roscosmos as a competent agency. For American men in their twenties who grew up on grainy footage of Soviet space triumphs, the current state of the Russian space program is a study in decay. Roscosmos’ budget has been slashed. Its once-vaunted Proton rocket is a relic. Its new Angara rocket is perpetually delayed. Its lunar program has suffered embarrassing failures. The space station segment Roscosmos operates is aging, leaking air, and facing structural cracks. Yet NASA still sends astronauts to train at Star City, still buys seats on Soyuz, and still coordinates launch schedules as if the Cold War never ended.

This is not charity. It is insurance. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program—run by SpaceX and, eventually, Boeing—was supposed to make the United States independent of Russian rides. And it has. The Crew Dragon is reliable, reusable, and cost-effective. But NASA learned a hard lesson after the Space Shuttle retirement in 2011, when it had zero domestic crew capability for almost a decade. During that gap, NASA paid Roscosmos roughly $90 million per seat. Now, with Crew Dragon and Starliner in the mix, NASA doesn’t need Russia. But it still wants the partnership. Because the ISS is a shared asset, and the station’s current orbit is sustained by Russian Progress cargo ships and Zvezda module thrusters. If Russia starts acting unilaterally—which it has occasionally threatened—the entire ISS could be at risk.

So cross-flights continue. In September 2024, NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson flew to the ISS on a Soyuz. In March 2025, another American will board a Soyuz for a long-duration stay. Meanwhile, Russian cosmonauts have flown on three separate Crew Dragon missions in the past two years. The logistics are handled. The training is coordinated. The public scuffles between NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Roscosmos head Yuri Borisov don’t change the fact that the two agencies still need each other in this one narrow corridor.

The real story here is about institutional inertia. Agencies, especially government space agencies, are not nimble startups. They are slow, risk-averse bureaucracies that operate on decade-long cycles. Breaking a relationship that was forged in the 1990s, hardened through the Shuttle-Mir program, and institutionalized through the ISS partnership is not something that happens overnight. Even as Russia’s space glory fades—its robotic missions fail, its launch cadence drops, its talent pool ages—the one thing Roscosmos still offers is a proven, human-rated crew vehicle that can get people to and from low Earth orbit. Soyuz works. It is not flashy, but it works. And until NASA has a second domestic crew option that is certified and flying regularly, it will keep buying those seats.

This is not a comfortable truth for American space enthusiasts who want to see Russia sidelined. But the spaceflight business is not about pride. It is about physics, scheduling, and risk management. The surest way to strand an astronaut on the ISS today is to cut ties entirely. So the cross-flights continue anyway. Not because anyone trusts Moscow. Not because Roscosmos is a respected partner. But because the alternative is a broken station and a stranded crew. And that is a failure no agency can afford.