There's an old Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in which Calvin wanders off missing at the zoo, and his Dad, searching for him, says "being a parent is wanting to hug and strangle your kid at the same time." I'm not sure why that strip stayed stuck in my brain all these years, but I can definitely sympathize with the concept, as both a parent and a space fan.

Today, NASA and its Commercial Crew partners faced the music on Capitol Hill, testifying about the latest delay for an already delayed program trying to launch astronauts from American soil for the first time since the end of the shuttle program in 2011. To recap the well-known facts: NASA can currently only access the ISS via the Russian Soyuz. The situation is politically unpalatable, expensive (NASA last paid about $82 million per Soyuz seat), and detrimental to the agency’s human research programs, because there aren’t enough astronauts aboard the station to fully utilize its potential.

For NASA, this has always been an annoyance, and today we learned it could escalate into a full-fledged problem. NASA has only purchased Soyuz seats through Fall 2019, and both Boeing and SpaceX won't be ready to carry out their first crewed test flights until the end of this year. Both company’s vehicles must next be certified before starting regular ISS service, and though publicly that's scheduled to happen in early 2019, internal estimates show it may not occur until December 2019 for SpaceX and February 2020 for Boeing.

Even if NASA panics and immediately buys more Soyuz seats, it takes about three years to build a Soyuz spacecraft, meaning there won’t be extra seats available anytime soon. Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for NASA's human spaceflight program, could only say NASA was "brainstorming" how to fill a potential gap in 2019.