The fact that a deliberately-drilled hole could get past quality control inspections is bad enough; to make things worse, it was reported that some Russian officials were accusing American astronauts of drilling the hole, which is ludicrous.





With the quality control issues, lack of trust, and the many, many other complexities currently happening with America’s relationship with Russia, maybe it’s time to take advantage of this pause and look into some other options. It also helps that NASA and Rocosmos arrangement ends in November, so it’s the perfect time to really rethink things.





Long-term, NASA has a plan for getting back regular and consistent access to space, by opening up the orbital-taxi service to private companies. Currently Boeing and SpaceX have been chosen, and both are expected to launch spacecraft with crews by 2020 at the earliest, which still leaves NASA with at least a year of having to bum rides to the space station.





Luckily, there could be another option: China’s Shenzhou spacecraft.





China has been launching crews in the Shenzhou since 2003, and the Shenzhou has performed pretty flawlessly for all seven of its crewed flights, which have included docking with two small space stations.



