You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Good day, Shortwaveers.

Aaron Scott here in the studio with NPR Science Correspondent Jeff Brumfield.

Jeff, it's a pleasure to speak with you in person.

Yes, it's really nice to be here.

So tensions between the US and Russia are running high right now.

But up in space, everybody is getting along just fine.

I think we will always look back on the International Space Station as being a fantastic example of what humanity can do when we cooperate.

That was astronaut Mark Van De Haai speaking recently from the space station.

Russia and America built it together and since 2000, it's been continuously inhabited by both Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts.

And despite everything that's happening here on Earth, the two sides continue to cooperate.

A full month into the invasion, Van De Haai climbed aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule to come back to Earth.

He sat shoulder to shoulder with two cosmonauts as their capsule departed from the Russian side of the station and landed in Kazakhstan.

A nominal entry, a perfect landing, a bullseye touchdown, as the Russian search and recovery forces in the MIA telecompers begin the process of landing sequentially.

But is the war new crane wears on there, signs that the relationship may be changing?

Some of Russia's other partners have stopped working with it in space and the head of Russia Space Agency has signaled that they might want to withdraw from the space station collaboration.

So today on the show, how will war down here on planet Earth is changing life up in space?

And what those changes say about the limits of science is a tool for diplomacy. I'm Jeff Brumfield.

And I'm Aaron Scott and you are listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from MPR.

Okay Jeff, so I guess the first thing I'm wondering about is how the US and Russia started working together in the first place.

Because I mean for most of the 20th century, they were rivals, right?

Yeah, that's why I thought, but the collaboration in Turns out actually goes all the way back to Sputnik.

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