The Economist 1/16/2018
IT WAS the sort of failure that rivets the world: two minutes into the launch of a Soyuz spacecraft from a site in Kazakhstan, the mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was aborted. Fortunately the two men on board, one each from Russia and America, were able to make a safe, if high-gravity, re-entry and landing. Dmitry Rogozin, the chief of Russia’s space agency (Roscosmos), and a canny politician himself, says crewed missions will remain on hold until an investigation reveals what went wrong. Given that the Russian Soyuz system is presently the only way to get people into orbit, this creates a situation that could leave the ISS empty from December. And America is powerless to do anything. How did it end up relying on Russian rocketry to gets its astronauts to the space station?
More:
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/10/16/why-does-america-still-use-soyuz-rockets-to-put-its-astronauts-in-space
