Right now, the US has one person in space. China has two.
The US has no manned launch capability.
I think of the Soyuz system as the "B-52 of space capsules", conceived in the 50's, first flown in the 60's, and kept flying by incremental avionics updates to the present day. Which makes for a well understood system.
In many ways the Chinese system is an offspring the Soyuz system, while great efforts are made to stress it is a completely Chinese design, clearly they have made many design choices which were directly inspired by the Soyuz capsules, from how the solar panels are attached/deployed to the mass fractions allocated to various parts of the system.
I expect that is for the same reason that Boeing's CST looks like a bigger version of Apollo, because Boeing had all of the Apollo data already and it was perhaps easier for them to start from there and tweak rather than take it from the a blank sheet. I find it particularly interesting that SpaceX's Dragon, Blue Origin's New Armstrong, and SNC's Dream Chaser manned capsules are quite a bit different both from each other and previously flown designs.
So what I see is that the US will shortly (as in within 12 - 18 months) have a variety of manned space launch capabilities, some of which will have targeted return to base capability.
The odd duck out here are the Russians as they really don't seem to have a replacement for Soyuz either in the works or anywhere close to being deployed. That surprises me as they certainly have the expertise to build such a system and they will be at a tactical and strategic disadvantage when both the US and China can launch crews with greater on orbit maneuvering options.
Perhaps this is because they don't really see a need for a new vehicle (Soyuz meets mission requirements just fine), let alone the benefit of having partially re-usable rockets?
Partially re-usable rockets require special launch/recovery procedures (ie. a "smart" barge parked in the ocean somewhere, or worse, over land someplace risking the population), a whole lot of R&D, a new untested vehicle, and no guaranteed payoffs (SpaceX's cost reduction and re-usability claims are yet to be proven).
The Soyuz, as you've pointed out, is fairly inexpensive (given it's mission), and is very well understood. From their perspective, it seems, the Soyuz is the ideal craft for the job, and any new build would largely result in a new craft meeting the same mission goals, ie. a waste of time and resources when they already have a vehicle that fills that need.
As of ~2013, Soyuz has about 939 successful launches, 24 failures, for a total of 963 launches[1]. Seems to be a "recipe" one doesn't want to tinker with.
[1] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2138/how-many-succe...
Just a bit of a nitpick, your overall point here is entirely sound.
This might be questionable. Soyuz (as the name implies) was built in USSR, not Russia.
After USSR dissolved some experts were outside Russia. And since several decades passed most people with Soviet knowledge are already retired.
You get to peek inside the capsule and realize a few things:
- The Soyuz is amazingly small and cramped
- The Soyuz looks and feels amazingly old compared to modern everyday expectations (the iPad is basically Star Trek TNG technology)
- Going to space is really, really difficult and expensive if this scary '60s tin can is still the best real-world tool we have.
In the Soyuz the crew sits almost with their knees against their chest.[1] The Space Shuttle flight deck basically felt like an airliner, but in space (at least as someone unfamiliar with airliners) [2].
Even in 2010 knowing that the program was being canceled, it was basically how I'd imagine space flight from the future. Although in reality the tiny-metal-can approach seems like it's still the safest and most cost effective way to get back from space.
[1] http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-26/h... (this is before putting on the bulky pressure suit)
[2] http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/442024main_s131e006074_hi...
The sojuz program
http://astronautix.com/s/soyuz.html
also relevant are the Kamanin diaries (head of the cosmonaut corps from 1960 to 1971)
It may be obvious but there are plenty more Americans who are back and walking around on planet earth than there are Chinese astronauts who have been put into orbit.
tell me in what way the current US capacity of launching men into space is ahead of China's?
If the US wanted/needed to, they could put a man up tomorrow (seriously just strap a capsule to Antares 203). The only difference is that we are taking time to safely transition to a commercial market for spaceflight.
I'm not trying to knock China, more power to them, but they are definitely not "ahead".