NASA on Monday insisted tensions linked to the war in Ukraine had no impact on International Space Station operations or the planned return of an American astronaut aboard a Russian capsule later this month.
Mark Vande Hei is due to fly to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule with cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov on March 30 after 355 days in space, a new U.S. record.
There have been fears that soaring tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine could leave the 55-year-old stranded on the outpost.
But speaking to reporters Monday, Joel Montalbano, NASA's ISS program manager, said: "I can tell you for sure Mark is coming home on that Soyuz. We are in communication with our Russian colleagues. There's no fuzz on that. The three crew members are coming home."
"There's been some discussion about that, but I can tell you we're ready. Our Roscosmos colleagues have confirmed that they're ready to bring the whole crew home, all three of them," he continued.
Over the weekend, Russian space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin warned again Western sanctions on Russia could cause the ISS to crash, by disrupting the operation of spacecraft vital to keeping the platform in orbit.
But on Monday, the Russian news agency TASS reported: "Russia's space corporation Roscosmos has never given its partners the slightest chance to doubt its reliability" and Vande Hei would go home as planned.
Montalbano added there had been no changes in day-to-day activities.
"All these activities have continued for 20 years and nothing has changed in the last three weeks: our control centers operate successfully, flawlessly, seamlessly," he said.
While the U.S. side of the ISS supplies power and life support, the Russian segment is vital for propulsion and attitude control – interdependencies that were woven into the project from its inception in the 1990s.
The U.S. is exploring means to keep the station in orbit via propulsion from Northrop Grumman and SpaceX ships, but this has not happened yet.
Crew swaps involving Russian cosmonauts going to Hawthorne, California, to train on SpaceX vehicles and American astronauts traveling to Star City in Russia to train for Soyuz are still planned "at this time," Montalbano said.
"At this time there is no indication from our Russian partners that they want to do anything differentm," he said. "So we are planning on continuing operations as we are today."
Montalbano noted the frontier of space has "no borders."
"You have heard this before, but when you are in space there are no borders," he said. "You don't see country lines or state lines, the teams work together. Are they aware of what’s going on on earth? Absolutely. But the teams are professional. The astronauts and the cosmonauts are some of the most professional groups you will ever see. They continue to operate well. They continue with all this work and there really is no tension with the team. They have been trained to do a job and they are doing that job."
Newsmax's Eric Mack contributed to this report.