Darth Chaltab said:

I'm pretty uninterested. After Columbia I sort of got disillusioned with... not the idea of Space Travel, but the reality. I became convinced that our government stopped caring about a serious space program a long time ago.

So if using Russian systems keeps our astronauts safe until NASA finally makes a good new vehicle, so be it.

I hardly think that the government stopped caring about it. I think it's really the American public that stopped caring about it. Just look at the Apollo program. Once we landed on the moon, nobody cared after that until there was a disaster. Now, most people consider space flight to be "routine" so when there is a disaster they get in an uproar for a few weeks (if even that long) and wonder what happened. People have to be continually reminded that there's nothing "routine" about space flight.