Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, plans to end his Twitter feud with a senior Russian space official, which was provoked by Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Kelly stated in a CNN article on Tuesday (Mar.15) that NASA had asked him and other former agency astronauts to end their feuds because they could harm the International Space Station relationship.
CNN obtained an email from an unnamed NASA official urging prudence before "attacking our Russian partners.
"As Americans," the NASA email reads, according to CNN, "each of us enjoys freedom of speech, and you are all empowered to speak your mind. However, please know that as former NASA astronauts, your words carry additional weight, and attacking our Russian partners is damaging to our current mission."
Kelly has been an outspoken opponent of Russia's invasion. Two of his primary targets have been the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos and its chief, Dmitry Rogozin, who has replied with insults of his own and has eventually blocked Kelly on Twitter.
Kelly told CNN that he intends to end his spat with Rogozin.
"I didn't have to, but I respect NASA, NASA's position, and the (official) that sent it," Kelly said.
In an op-ed published in The Washington Post on Tuesday, the former NASA astronaut also explained why he initiated the Twitter spat with Rogozin.
"In the early 1990s, our countries' space agencies were willing to work together to ease Cold War tensions, and so the United States and Russia agreed to embark on a shared space station," Kelly wrote in the op-ed.
"To me, it has always been one of the great achievements of our nations that we came together to build and operate an orbiting station as a peaceful cooperation, and I was privileged to serve there," he added.
However, recent statements by Rogozin and Roscosmos have threatened the collaboration, as Kelly explained in the op-ed. According to the former astronaut, Rogozin threatened to de-orbit the space station and smash it into the United States.
"More troublingly, last week Rogozin tweeted a strange video portraying Russian cosmonauts separating the Russian segment and flying away from the space station after waving goodbye to American astronaut Mark Vande Hei."
With two cosmonauts aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, Vande Hei is slated to return home on March 30. The video appears to threaten to abandon him, which Kelly described as an unfathomable breach of the decades-long trust established between the two countries in space.
"I was appalled, so I called [Rogozin] out strongly on Twitter in a rapidly escalating back-and-forth until he ultimately blocked me."
Kelly concluded the op-ed with a call for peace.
