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Comment by sandis | Hacker News Reader

The idea wasn't to have them compete. The idea is to have "dissimilar redundancy", so that the US still would have a human-rated launch system with the ability to go to the ISS in case one of them gets grounded for whatever reason.

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While that seems prudent, at the same time for how many years have we been beholden to russian launches because we didn’t have an american system at all after the shuttle? Seems like the sky didn’t fall during that time despite only one launch system we had to go to Kazakhstan to borrow. Kind of hard to justify the cost to the tax payer when the benefit they get is effectively zero since no new capabilities are present really: we could launch people to iss before and we can do that now too.

Given today's political climate, that seems extremely risky, especially since Russia has already officially announced the intent to discontinue cooperating with the ISS program

And besides, the purpose of aerospace spending on human spaceflight isn't just for the purpose of human spaceflight, but also for related capabilities.

Right, I forget we still burn billions on that nuclear arsenal capable of glassing the planet in a half hour should some 75 year olds in dc decide that is prudent.

Yes but before you get too snarky, we also do other things like provide free navigation services and weather forecasts.

The cost, politically and otherwise of relying on the Russians now is much higher than it was 15 years ago.

And in any case Russia's entire space program is at risk of going under given the budget issues they're going to be dealing with.

Yes, also referred to as “Assured Access.”

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