2014-- A Space Irony

When a Soyuz space capsule touched down in Kazakhstan this week with two Russians and American Astronaut Mike Hopkins aboard after 166 days in orbit on the International Space Station, a small irony was obvious. While they’d been floating around in a gravity-free model of international cooperation, their governments had been plunging toward a major confrontation over the future of Ukraine.
But the even greater irony evident out there in space is the extent to which America’s satellites—including the super-secret birds sent aloft by the National Reconnaissance Office—depend on Russian-built engines to get into orbit in the first place. [More]    [BJS]