The flight of the International Space Station opens new frontiers to the rivalry between Russia and the United States

It sounded like a dark turn for a sci-fi movie – the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, alluding to a foreign plot aimed at sabotaging the International Space Station.

Last month, flight controllers in Houston and Moscow said they detected a tiny pressure leak on the International Space Station, circling the globe in low Earth orbit.

According to a NASA press release, the crew was not in danger.

After a few repairs, the crew discovered a tiny leak in the Russian segment of the orbital complex, causing a minor loss of pressure.

The solution was simple: NASA said the crew had used Kapton tape – an industrial film – to temporarily stop the leak.

Roscosmos said the pressure on the international space station "is stable and that no other leak has been detected" after the international team repaired the hole.

End of the story? Not enough. Earlier this week, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin suggested that the leak was caused by something other than an accident or a production failure.

"There is another version that we do not exclude: premeditated action in space," he said, according to national news agencies.

Rogozin suggested that there were "several attempts to impact with a drill", pointing out that the impact had been done "with an unstable hand" because the exercises "slid on the surface", the news agencies reported.

New uncertainty for spatial collaboration

The United States and Russia have benefited from a long collaboration on the International Space Station. Launched in 1998, the station has mission control centers in Moscow and Houston.

Russian launch systems Soyuz – launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan – transport crew members to the station, NASA paying for seats. The current crew of the International Space Station includes three Americans, two Russians and one German.

This cooperation between the US and Russian space agencies has not generally been affected by the Cold War conflict that erupted between Washington and Moscow after Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula from the Black Sea to Ukraine in 2014.

"There has always been a real kumbaya in space up to now," said Joe Pappalardo, author of Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight. "The International Space Station is remarkable because it is so successful and has been running for so long."

But the appointment of Rogozin earlier this year has caused some uncertainty in the mix.

Rogozin, former Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the defense industry, is a warmongering and outspoken politician.

And he has an ax against the United States. In 2014, he was placed on a list of US sanctions, a measure that the White House claimed was aimed at "imposing costs on people who influence the Russian government and the deterioration of the situation in Ukraine" .

An article in SpaceNews, an industry publication, described Rogozin's appointment as "his biggest trouble" for the US-Russia partnership.

"The man who spent four years tracking down the United States for using Russian rockets to reach the international space station received the reign of [sic] NASA's most important partner, "the article said.

US dependence on the Russian launch will soon change. NASA hired two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, to develop a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems to transport crews into low Earth orbit and the International Space Station, and vice versa.

This effort, called the Commercial Crew Program, is moving toward the finalization of designs and construction, although the US Government Accountability Office has warned in a June report that further delays in the program could result in NASA contracting for seats on the Russian vessel Soyuz only until November 2019. "

Is space re-emerging as another arena for US-Russian animosity? Rogozin's remarks made the headlines, but Roscosmos officially advised caution.

In a statement released Wednesday, the agency "called on media representatives to refrain from publishing unverified information, received from anonymous sources about the findings of the commission's investigation into the emergency situation aboard the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, which is now part of the International Space Station. "

The commission's investigation, the statement added, will be completed by mid-September.

Meanwhile, the mission continues aboard the International Space Station. After the repair of the leak, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev posted another striking photo of the space.

"Well, are we going to continue our Planet Earth tour?" he tweeted. "This time, we fly over the Nile, the famous Egyptian pyramids and the Suez Canal."

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2018