just as it would be good to have Chinese and EU more involved

The EU, or, rather, ESA (not exactly the same thing; not all EU members are ESA members and vice-versa) is fully commited with the ISS. There are European modules up there, there have been regularly European astronauts making visits, etc. The problem, in the current situation, is that ESA does not have its own crewed vehicle, having followed a strategy of relying on Russian and American ships, which seemed to cover the needs pretty well, while focusing on other stuff. At the light of what has happened recently, this might have been the wrong choice, but the fact is that not many of the bad news we've seen recently were clearly in the making a few years ago.

Still, the current dire straits might make ESA jump to the next level, probably adapting the automatic transfer vehicle design to crewed flights, the (lemme check) STCS (hate-hate-hate these abbreviations! Hate 'em!). That, however, would always be several years in the future.

russian and NASA scientists have worked together for years and have developed good working relationships.

NASA, by it's nature, is tied to the military. becuase of this it is extra sensitive to political disagreements between goverments and militaries. let's try to keep the rhetoric down on our side and hopefully they will too. otherwise we risk handicapping future cooperative research potential.

Soyuz is convenient and its good to have Russian involvement in an international project like this (just as it would be good to have Chinese and EU more involved). But there is no reason we can't fast track our own capsule design to take over these jobs.

I think if your going to throw money at a problem, solve it with your own people and spend the money here.
Extending credit to Energia gets us out of a jam for now… but thats only a temporary solution.

As some others have suggested, it doesn't sound like an issue with money as such, but an issue with credit to cover the production costs until the eventual payments come through. Here's hoping they can sort something out.

I would also recommend that funding be found somewhere to build more Soyuz spacecrafts. They have an admirable track record of longevity and dependability.

So what you have is a very Bush like plan.
Promise the moon (literally) and kill the shuttle while we're all starry eyed about moon and mars bases.

If it works He goes down as the Republicans Kennedy, and if it don't… By the time this thing comes to fruition Bush will be long gone.

When you consider the monumental amount of effort that must go into construction of these large scale projects, it simply isn't realistic to Go it Alone. Either we hang together or we hang separately.

Seems like it is up to the private industry now.

Unless someone decides to dump lots of cash into Energiya. Although the banks won't make any loans anytime soon; they won't lend me money to build a tiny round house.

Needless to say, Russia was caught by a stray bullet fired in Wall Street, New York, NY, USA. Just like the rest of the world.

I've got no problem buying tickets from multiple sources… But putting all our eggs on only one of their baskets (A Russian one at that) is just begging for trouble.