Now that the Space Shuttle program is retired, with the last flight, on the Atlantis, landing in Houston July 21, American astronauts depend on getting to and from the International Space Station by hitching a ride, at a mere $63 million per seat, on the Soviet Soyuz aircraft.

Problem is, mounting mishaps have recently plagued the Soyuz, placing the program on hold while testing is done. Meanwhile, two groups of three American astronauts remain in the station now, and, while they are safe, they do depend on food and other supplies delivered by future Soyuz flights for the long haul. And of course NASA may become trigger-shy to send up more Americans in the bug-ridden Soyuz.

After a malfunction in late August, an unmanned Russian Soyuz rocket, Progress 44 cargo ship, crashed. It was loaded with fresh supplies to deliver tho the Space Station. The Soyuz crash is the fourth recent Soviet mission to have failed. A Proton-M rocket crashed into the sea because the fuel tank was over-filled. Then the control software in another (non-Soyuz) rocket failed. A few days before the Soyuz accident, Moscow requested help from Americans to search for the telecommunications satellite Express AM4, which had gone missing after being launched into orbit.

"It kind of violates our Plan-B approach at NASA," West Seattle-raised astronaut Captain Gregory C. Johnson told the West Seattle Herald by phone Saturday, referring to the Soyez being our sole manned vehicle to reach space. Johnson is a West Seattle High School class of '72 grad, and a retired astronaut who piloted the Atlantis Space Shuttle May, 2009, on a successful mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. He currently tests aircraft at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base near Houston.

"We have always had a Plan B at NASA," he continued. "There is no Plan B because our astronauts can't get to the space station except on Soviet (aircraft). Yeah, we currently rely on the Soviets but we hope not to in the future. Hopefully in two to four years we will be launching American astronauts on American vehicles.

"We have four companies still in the running," he pointed out. "Space X (Space Exploration Technologies) launches its cargo vehicle in November. That is the same rocket that eventually would launch (passengers). Boeing is in the running for a commercial capsule and they intend to link it up with a commercial rocket (built by Lockheed Martin). There is a lot of good work being done. New Horizons launched a rocket by Jeff Bezos last week that had trouble."

Bezos, the CEO of Seattle-based Amazon, made a statement Sept. 2 in his blog: "This week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin (vehicle) team is doing an outstanding job. We're already working on our next development vehicle."

Said Captain Johnson, "So the deal is that rockets are hard. Overall you have to take them very seriously."