As Russian fighter jets bombard Ukraine’s most advanced spacecraft maker with long-range missiles, they are devastating the “Rocket City” of Dnipro with the aim of crushing a Ukrainian aerospace competitor - a rising star in the design of orbital launchers.

The Ukrainian space outpost, which provides rocket components for ISS co-founders NASA and the European Space Agency, “is in an area where hostile actions are ongoing,” Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s Director of Space Transportation, told reporters at a webcast press briefing.

“We are in contact with colleagues” at the embattled outpost on a daily basis, he added while outlining ESA’s suspension of almost all joint missions with Moscow. This freeze, so far, hasn’t been extended to halt the ISS “space détente” experiment forged with post-Soviet Russia.

As Moscow’s bombers strafed Ukraine, the head of Russia’s space agency staged a round of “celestial Russian roulette” over the fate of the ISS and its astronauts. Irate over Western sanctions, he threatened Moscow could crash the Station over the US or Europe.

In a Twitter battle cry, the Roscosmos commander warned he could recall the Russian spacecraft that periodically boosts the Station into a safe orbit, and instead allow the observatory to fall, burning through the atmosphere before striking the ground like a super-missile.

He echoed Vladimir Putin’s threat to launch nuclear warheads against Britain and other ISS allies. While Dmitry Rogozin was recently rotated out of the space tsar post, he remains a formidable power-holder in Putin’s inner circle of advisors on nuclear and space weaponry.

The new head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, likewise oversees the rapid-fire expansion of Russia’s ICBMs, and is likely to continue nuclear jousting with the West. Yet the blitzkrieg on Ukraine’s space center, backed by nuclear threats, could finally end Moscow’s role on the ISS.

When the Kremlin threatened to remove its Station-keeping capsule, the other partners quickly began testing an alternative craft to stabilise the ISS and protect its spacefarers. Northrop Grumman speeded one Antares-Cygnus spacecraft, with precision boosters, to the observatory. 

The first stage of the prototype Antares rocket, the anointed lifesaver of the entire Space Station, is designed and produced by the Ukrainian space outpost now under missile fire, so Russia’s strikes threaten to explode the ISS rescue plan created by its pro-peace partners.

Yet these same attacks could mark the ultimate death knell for Russia’s membership in the ISS coalition. Moscow’s missiles could backfire to become the ammunition in the Russian roulette drama that triggers the self-destruction of Roscosmos as a cosmopolitan aerospace ally.