Hitchhiking to Orbit

U.S. to rely on Russia for manned spaceflight, NY Times/IHT

“The United States has had periods in which its astronauts could not reach space: between the end of the Apollo program and the beginning of shuttle flights in 1981, and after the loss of the shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. But the coming interval could become the longest of all if the rollout of NASA’s new rockets is significantly delayed.”

NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study — Final Report, Nov. 2005, Executive Summary, section 1.1.1

“Dr. Michael Griffin was named the new NASA Administrator in April 2005. With concurrence from Congress, he immediately set out to restructure NASA’s Exploration Program by making its priority to accelerate the development of the CEV to reduce or eliminate the planned gap in U.S. human access to space. He established a goal for the CEV to begin operation in 2011 and to be capable of ferrying crew and cargo to and from the ISS.”