Russia was the cheap safe bet 2 years ago.
Right now, everybody is jumping on SpaceX. Rightly.

BTW, that article was from more than a year ago, and was wrong.
it was NOT Obama that lobbied for the monies. O lobbied to allow ULA to be allowed their current order. ULA and OSC continue to push to be allowed to buy and use Russian engines. Oddly, the GOP is split. About 1/2 of them are pushing it, and the other half are joining O and the dems in saying NO.

And you have it wrong.
When the shuttle was stopped, W started paying Russia for launching our astronauts.
We have been doing it eversince. The problem is, that the GOP would rather pay MORE money to Russia for launching humans, then pay less money to our private space program to get multiple launchers off the ground.

And it is the house GOP that is gutting our private space again, and actually pushed for more flights with Russia.

No doubt, when Russia loses a manned flight, then the GOP will wonder what went wrong and tell ppl like you that they had nothing to do with the massive movements of CCxDev money to fund their SLS and Russian flights.

LOL.
First, All of America's gov. sats use American launchers. 2 launchers use Russian parts, of which 1 of them blew up several months ago.
Secondly, SpaceX's F9 is SAFER, and MUCH CHEAPER than the Russian Rockets. In addition, within another year, they will be even cheaper again. Right now, SpaceX has over 1/2 of the commercial launch business that is available for the future.

First, A progress using the same rocket as manned launches failed last month. That progress is the same as a Soyuz.

Secondly, all of the companies are suffering from the same problem over there: quality control.

Thirdly, the quality issues started long before the embargo.

Finally, the GOP is putting loads of money into SLS. Why? Because they view NASA as a jobs bill for themselves.

The GOP continues to gut funding for development of manned private space launch, but will continue to pour money into the SLS, AND having Russia do the manned launches. Fucking insane

Oh, the dems have done a GREAT job on pork.
However, it is the GOP that have continued to gut the new space programs. They killed off COTS-D, and keep trying to kill CCxDev. Oddly, they scream about using Russian launches, while they are the ones that force us on them.

Actually no.
The far right wingers are the ones pushing for global destruction.
The left wingers are turning this into a political battle when it should not be.

Yes, I DO understand it. China continues to grow their coal=>electricity emissions, while the far left screams about nations that have been working at lowering it. Mostly it is about America that they bitch.
Oddly, America has emitted far less CO2 over the last millinium than has either Europe OR China.

And with the far left metrics, they have loved to use total levels, until 2006, which is when China emitted more than America. Then they switched to using the emissions since 1850, which THIS YEAR, China will become the number 1 emitter. The problem is, that ANY time before 1850 is a contest between China and Europe for emissions.

Yet, the far left will do less than the far right on solving this.

the fact that the head guy at Baidu now, came from Google. Basically, he took Google's technology and then was funded by China's gov ( who is behind Baidu's funding on this ).

Hopefully, someday soon, the west will realize that hiring Chinese means simply giving your technology over to the CHinese gov.

Time to blame the west which alltogether accounts for less than 1/3 of all emissions.
At the same time, the far left will allow the single nation that is over 1/3 or 33% and growing fast, to continue to grow its emissions FASTER than the west can cut.

Yeah. Go China.

Are you sure that it was not on Dr. Demento?

Actually, you can thank idiots, like yourself. W killed the shuttle and stopped all manufacturing lines by 2007. Had O restarted the shuttle program, at a cost of half of NASA's budget, the very first flight MIGHT have been this year.

OTOH, had the neo-cons not killed off cots-d , we would have had manned flights back in 2013 or earlier.

NASA did not choose that. Nixon did.

NASA is not the one to blame. The GOP have forced NASA to be an underfunded jobs program for themselves.