As a number of people are pointing out, with the Russians invading Georgia, which is both an E.U. candidate and a U.S. ally, the option of using Russian craft to get to the ISS is fading fast. Even if we assume that the U.S. government is willing to use Russian launch systems, it's damned near certain that they would charge rates that make Halliburton look like a non-profit. After all, Putin and his new proxy boy have made it pretty clear that they're none too fond of the U.S.A. and selfless they ain't.
So what do we do now?
Personally, I say that Congress should immediately, as in within the next month, put another billion or so into scholarships for engineering students and another billion into funding for U.S. manufacturing startups. Because not only are we going to be desperate in coming years for the kind of labor that engineering students and engineers provide, we're going to need a hell of a lot more people who can help aerospace ventures tool up. Admittedly, I was convinced of this *before* Ossetia became the new word for "place where people are shooting at each other a heck of a bunch" but I'm still convinced that I'm right.
Beyond that? Will, first of all, NASA should be reactivating the X-38 program with a quickness, including open-sourcing as many of the specs as possible. NASA is running behind and letting the rest of us understand and take our shot at improving the designs should help us to catch up.
There are plenty of other options, as this article lays out nicely.
But the other big lesson we should be taking away from this is not to make our strategic assets dependent on the cooperation of a totalitarian regime. This should be a no-brainer but evidently it wasn't. I have been as happy as anybody to see the U.S. coming up with reasons to keep the aerospace community in the former Soviet Union employed and equipped doing relatively non-military work but there really need to be limits.
Will this experience keep our government from doing this again? Probably not. We've got a long history of cozying up to dictators of all stripes to do our work for us. But that's a subject for another day.
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