Russia, in response to the efforts made by the U.S. sanctions may suspend the delivery rocket engines DR-180 and K-33 in the US, stated on tuesday vice-prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin. Moscow, 13 May – RIA Novosti. Stop deliveries of Russian rocket engines in the U.S. strikes on the American space program, but at the same time does not affect the Russian enterprises, said RIA news editor-in-chief of the magazine News space” Igor With solo performances appeared Alexei Yagudin.

“We sell these engines to the Americans virtually at a loss. When was the treaty, the cost engine in the United States dollar was one, now it has remained the same, and the purchasing power dollar fell, at the same time, and their salaries, we have grown up, and costs”, – said the expert”

China might be contemplating some variation of the smaller-&-flexible-&-more efficient type of space station, that’ll serve as a test platform, for the pre-launching & parked-orbit placement of deep-space-going vehicles. I personally find the exercise mostly unnecessary, and time squandering, but if they can avoid copying the ISS to full detail——-AND avoid getting themselves bogged down into doing nothing but LEO activities for more than a decade, then there might still be hope, for humanity finally leaving the cradle.

Still, I have my doubts about LEO stations actually leading to renewed Lunar exploration, perhaps a decade later: NASA will most likely just get so comfortable & complacent about the safe-ness & easiness of LEO, that it’ll end up pushing no further. Getting trapped in LEO, without any viable exit strategy, is a pitfall that appears very difficult to avoid!

Not until SpaceX started playing the patriotism card, and a federal trade court judge decided to try her hand at international politics did Russia even mention sanctioning space.

I agree completely. In fact, I spelled that out in some detail above. I certainly never said here that a destination was a vision for space.

Learning how to crawl isn’t a vision, nor is learning how to walk. Nor is learning how to fly, or travel through space. The vision is what you do when you can walk, or fly, or travel through space, and that’s about a lot more than where you can go. Maybe it’s about mining the cosmos (to the extent humans need to do that in situ), or about insuring the species, or about science, or about sticking it to the Chinese. But it’s not about going to the Moon or Mars.

That’s where the “round-and-round” ISS haters are misled. To them, it’s precisely about where you go (or don’t go).