But one factor remains underplayed. The United States is currently engaged in a fiercely contested space race with China, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. Space offers unlimited energy, unlimited resources, and unlimited internet connectivity — and the High North is crucial. This is because satellites that orbit from pole to pole must pass each pole with every orbit, which means that they fly over a given point in the High North far more often than a given point toward the Equator. As such, places like Svalbard are ideal locations for ground stations that keep in touch with constellations of satellites, be they commercial or military.

Those ground stations are where data transmitted by the satellites, from UberEats orders to key Ukrainian intelligence, are funneled into high-speed subsea internet cables. It’s little wonder, therefore, that Svalbard is always mobbed by Nato ships, and little wonder that those subsea cables have, in recent history, been attacked. Previously, space was about scientific discovery, but now, as the newly appointed Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman has acknowledged, it is also about strategic security dominance — it is the most important war-fighting domain. Whoever controls the highest altitudes in space, controls the battle domains on earth. And the world’s first space war is already well underway: Kyiv would have very limited offensive or defensive capability if it were unable to use Elon Musk’s Starlink service. China has therefore designated Starlink as a military entity rather than a private company, and is building satellite networks that have the ability to damage or destroy Starlink satellites.

Given this security situation, the US doesn’t want to rely solely on Svalbard. So it maintains another space base, Pituffik, on the northwest coast of Greenland. As the second most important space base after Svalbard, it is of immense strategic importance — not least because, being closer to the US, it is much more easily defended.

Given that Denmark already allows the US to maintain Pituffik and other bases, one might ask why the White House wants sovereignty over the territory. The answer is that the White House does not trust Europe to be a reliable partner. Remember Russiagate? Back in 2016, Trump, then Republican nominee for the presidency, was smeared by a dossier that was written by a former British intelligence official. The Democrats used this information against Trump, whose administration takes a dim view of European interference with American elections — especially when that interference is targeted against the MAGA movement. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, has been declassifying material that the White House views as incriminating evidence of “weaponization and politicization of intelligence”, going so far as to refer to a “treasonous conspiracy” to prevent Trump from winning in 2016. It is an extraordinary political moment in American history, one where Trump is on the brink of bringing legal charges against the former heads of the intelligence agencies and former presidents.

It’s not just the Steele “Russiagate” dossier that embroils Europe in these high-stakes domestic politics. The White House also blames Europe, and Europeans such as George Soros, for funding Antifa, and other movements and organizations that oppose Trump. Combined, all this dirty laundry has been disastrous for Transatlantic relations, and it has come at a time when there has already been tension between Europe and Trump. In his first term, Trump loudly chastised Europe for sponging off the American defense budget. In his second, he has been trying to end the war in Ukraine. Europe’s leaders have, in the White House view, been nothing but obstructive to the goal of bringing peace to Europe. Trump thinks of himself as trying to prevent World War Three from breaking out, even as the Europeans oppose peace deals and call for more aggressive action against Russia and Putin.

And the White House believes that Europe is only going to become even more difficult to deal with. In 2024, JD Vance suggested that the “first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon” might be the UK, which had just elected a Labour government. At the end of last year, the US National Security Strategy (NSS) struck a similar note, arguing that mass migration has created the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” for Europe as we know it. “Should present trends continue,” the NSS had it, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” JD Vance spelled it out, expressing concern about who is going to be in control of the nuclear arsenals in Western Europe, given the rise of “Islamist aligned” parties. Europeans might strongly disagree with this, but it is the White House’s interpretation; seen in this light, the purchase of Greenland would represent the transfer of a crucial security asset from an unreliable partner to the direct ownership of the US.

And there is specific dissatisfaction with Denmark as well as with the EU. The administration’s view is that Denmark has been at the forefront of not only supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia, but blocking any possibility of a peace negotiation going forward. Denmark, in short, is a troublesome vassal — and a vassal that happens to own an immensely valuable defense asset within the hemisphere that the “Donroe Doctrine” posits as America’s to dominate.

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Nor has the administration ruled out the use of force to take the island. One of Trump’s key advisers, Stephen Miller, was singularly belligerent, telling CNN that “we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower”, and that “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland”. The pugnacity has shocked European leaders, who have issued a joint statement to say they are willing to defend the island. But the shock is all part of Trump’s plan. In every one of his negotiations, from property deals to international treaties, he first throws a negotiating grenade to create chaos. Then in he walks, and offers to talk. In this case, the seizing Greenland rhetoric is the grenade. Trump, who cares little about the norms of international relations, is probably hoping that this detonation will encourage Denmark and its allies to accept a deal.

Meanwhile, the White House is deploying a charm offensive towards the Greenlanders — fundamentally an Inuit population rather than a Danish one. The history between the Greenlanders and the Danes is a troubled one, which is partly why Denmark, over recent years, has devolved political authority to Greenland — and also because it is a terrifically costly territory to support. Trump, then, is reaching out to the Greenlanders and offering them the opportunity of no longer having to answer to the Danes, and instead gaining a privileged status within the United States. In financial terms, the Greenlanders have much to gain from being folded into the American economy: they could, for example, cut deals for the extraction of minerals. Denmark is vehemently objecting to these American overtures, but the fact is that it has devolved enough power for Greenland to be able to make its own decision about whether to be incorporated into the United States.

Europeans are now obviously hoping that Trump will get distracted and that the matter of a Greenland purchase will go away. But the game is already in play, and the White House knows it probably has limited time. Trump wants an expanded US, within a more secure hemisphere, to be the legacy he hands on at the end of his second term. Woe betide the Europeans who stand in his way.

“From the crew of Apollo 8”, Borman ended, “we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good earth.” When asked on his return whether the moon was made of green cheese, Anders replied “No, it’s made of American cheese.”

“That was probably the most magical Christmas Eve I’ve ever experienced,” Gene Kranz, the Apollo Flight Director, recalled. “It was literally magic. It made you prickly. You could feel the hairs on your arms rising.”

For Americans, it was a glorious end to a terrible year of assassinations, riots and war. One woman wrote to Nasa: “Thank you for saving 1968.” Time made the three astronauts its Men of the Year. “The voyage of Apollo 8”, wrote the Washington Post in its roundup of the year, “did more than any single event … to restore man’s faith in himself.”

Apollo 8 was originally supposed to test the complete lunar package in earth orbit, but the lunar module was not yet ready. Rather than delay the mission, Nasa decided to send the command and service modules to the moon, to test the worthiness of the craft for the long voyage.

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When the navigation numbers were crunched, it was discovered that the orbit would begin on Christmas Eve. Nasa, always obsessed with publicity, could not believe its luck. Going ahead was nevertheless foolhardy. The veteran astronaut Alan Shepard later claimed that it was “the single greatest gamble in space flight then, and since”. Crucial systems were not remotely ready. “Shit, we didn’t even have the software to fly Apollo in Earth orbit, much less to the Moon”, Deke Slayton, another astronaut, claimed. In the race to the moon, however, risks seemed worthwhile.

Nasa still feared the Soviets might get there first, for good reason. On 8 December, 1968, the Russian cosmonaut Pavel Belyayev was waiting on the launch pad at Tyuratam, in Kazakhstan. His itinerary was to go to the moon, circle it, and come back – just like Apollo 8. Four hours before the scheduled launch, however, he was removed from the Zond 7 capsule when problems developed with the rocket. After a long inspection, Russian officials decided to make the mission unmanned. The rocket blasted off, reached 27 miles and then exploded. NASA enjoyed an early Christmas.

“What is it you want, Mary?”, George Bailey asks his sweetheart in the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. “You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it … I’ll give you the moon, Mary.”  That bright white orb had always been the stuff of romance. Apollo 8, however, threw a big bucket of cold water over that nonsense. “We don’t know if you can see this on the TV screen,” Anders reported, “but the moon is nothing but a milky waste. Completely void.” Borman then added: “it’s a – a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing … It makes you realize what you have back there on earth.”

The first manned mission to the moon revealed what everyone already knew, but few were prepared to admit: there’s nothing very special about it. C. S. Lewis, musing on what Apollo would mean, predicted that

“The moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers – will have been taken from us forever. Part of our mind, a huge mass of our emotional wealth, will have gone. … he who first reaches [the moon] steals something from us all.”

The moon’s romance had always been a figment of the imagination, but a rather lovely one. The same could be said for space travel in general. Space is cold, forbidding, rather boring and deadly. Its beauty and attraction are figments of the imagination.

That Christmas flight proved that the Americans would win the race to the moon. But did that race have any meaning? It was not about advancing science, nor was it really about the moon itself. If the moon had real value, there’d have been a war over it by now.

Its importance lay only as an arbitrary symbol of supremacy in the Cold War. John Kennedy, who first announced the moon mission on 25 May 1961, recognised as much. In a brief moment of candour, he once asked: “Don’t you think I would rather spend these billions on programs here at home, such as health and education and welfare? But in this matter we have no choice. The Nation’s prestige is too heavily involved.”

On another occasion, he told his cabinet: “I’m not that interested in space. … We’ve wrecked our budget … and the only justification for it … [is] getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians.”

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The shallowness of the space race rendered it difficult to assign meaning to Apollo 8. Some tried to turn the mission into a defining moment, a watershed in the human story. “This is the last day of the old world,” Arthur C. Clarke remarked. “If there is an ultimate truth to be learned from this historic flight,” President Lyndon Johnson surmised, “it may be this: There are few social or scientific or political problems which cannot be solved by men, if they truly want to solve them together.” At times like this, Americans seem to like tripe.

The poet Archibald Macleish desperately tried to give the event sacred meaning: “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, those brothers were killing one another with ever increasing ferocity in wars, riots and random murders. Much as astrologists like to think that the moon affects our behaviour, this was one instance when it clearly did not.

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So what did it all mean? The Apollo 8 astronauts travelled to the moon and discovered the earth. “The vast loneliness of the moon … makes you realize just what you have back there on earth,” Lovell remarked. All that effort and money on the space programme had shown that it was actually the earth that was special.

That was the message behind those spectacular pictures of Earthrise taken by the crew. Compared to the desolation of the Moon, the earth was an exquisite pearl floating in vast emptiness. The environmental lobby loved the photos even if it condemned the wasteful industry that had produced them. “Earthrise” was used on countless posters encouraging people to respect their planet. Some ecologists even began to speak of “Spaceship Earth”.

In other words, Apollo 8 qualified as the most expensive trip to a viewpoint ever undertaken. It did not change us. It did not solve our problems. It did not enhance the brotherhood of man. It simply showed us the earth, in all its vulnerable beauty. Shoving aside all the romantic tosh, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

It’ll be an occasion to look back, but also forward to the future of manned spaceflight.

There’ll be talk of a new dawn for space exploration. Expect particular reference to private companies, such as Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and XCOR, competing to pioneer space tourism.

There’ll also be some wild speculation about the race to get to Mars.

In a sobering essay for Quillette, Philip Backman exposes the whole enterprise to the hard vacuum of reality.

Let’s start with this space tourism business, where almost all of the progress made so far has been in regard to sub-orbital as opposed to orbital flight:

“Many may not be aware of the mighty gulf that exists between sub-orbital and orbital flight. To the uninitiated they seem very similar; a suborbital ride is over quickly but both make it to space. A closer look, however, reveals the shocking difference. Suborbital vehicles reach a speed near one kilometers per second at the time of rocket engine shut down, and because of this, they remain in space for only minutes. For low altitude orbital flight, at that same point, speed is only slightly shy of eight kilometers per second.”

And that’s not all – Backman explains that because the ‘energy of motion’ is proportional to the square of velocity, “suborbital spacecrafts can only achieve a paltry one to three percent of the kinetic energy acquired by other similar sized vehicles propelled into a continuous circular orbit”.

It’ll certainly take a ‘giant leap’ before we commercialise proper manned spaceflight.

But what about Elon Musk and his SpaceX initiative? The Falcon Heavy rocket – a partially reusable orbital launch system – had a very successful maiden flight only last month. As pictured on every front page in the world, its payload was a Tesla Roadster (another one of Elon Musk’s groundbreaking products) – with a dummy astronaut as its ‘driver’. All brilliant stuff – and brilliant PR – but, as the cynics point out, NASA put a car on the moon in 1971 together with some real astronauts to drive it.

The Roadster is on a trajectory to Mars, symbolising Musk’s ultimate ambition to colonise the red planet. But what would be the point of that? Contrary to what you may have heard, our own planet has plenty of uninhabited space – vast swathes of territory with no permanent residents. Here, I don’t even mean Antarctica, but countries such as Australia and Canada – or even Spain (Monday’s UnPacked features research showing that only 13% of the square kilometres that comprise Spanish territory are inhabited).

One might object that these places are just too cold or hot or arid or or remote for anyone to want to live there. But compared with Mars or anywhere else off-planet they’re paradise – and, furthermore, infinitely easier to get too. Even if we screwed up our planet through climate change, it’d still be preferable to the rest of the solar system, which is a dump quite frankly.

There’s a lot of space-based science to be done of course; but very little of it requires scientists in situ. The big exception is the study of the effect of space travel on the human body – a wonderfully circular justification for manned space flight.

It’s already the case that machines – i.e. satellites – are doing most of the science that can be done in space (and also making all of the money to made there). With ongoing advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, it should be obvious that unmanned systems are the only rational way to explore and develop the ‘high frontier.’

Unfortunately, reason doesn’t always come to the fore in these matters. Referring to dead-end programs such as the Space Shuttle, Backman exposes the weird effect that manned spaceflight has on the political mind:

“I can’t help but get the impression – I’m sure others have – that these post Apollo programs have survived, not on their own merits, but as enterprises carried forth by the momentum of Apollo and an overwhelming nostalgia for the greatness that once was. Apollo was such a striking visual symbol of American greatness that to completely end human spaceflight would be tantamount to declaring a deliberate retreat from greatness to the world. Enough people advocate for the illusion, and so it continues.”

Could the same zombie momentum propel us to Mars (or at least cause us to waste billions of dollars in the attempt)? There’s a real danger it might – especially if it turns into a race between nations to get there first.

Only last week Donald Trump said the US would be going to Mars “very soon”.

Here’s a different idea: the nations of the world should sit down and agree an indefinite moratorium on manned spaceflight – and let their robots scramble for the stars instead.

Examples of things that are super-abundant – or on the way to being so – include information, entertainment, data storage, food calories and renewable energy (at times of peak production). This is not true for everyone and in every place, of course; but as William Gibson once said “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

The growing scale and sophistication of automation will speed our progress towards universal super-abundance. But that leaves the question of the raw materials from which we make stuff. Robots will one day make just about any consumer good we could hope for, just not out of thin air.

Given the demands placed upon it by the hyper-productive industries of the future, will our battered planet be able to cope?

Maybe not, but according to Aaron Bastani in the London Review of Books, we won’t be limited to one world. Before too long, he says, the rest of the Solar System will be within our grasp – especially its mineral-bearing asteroids:

“A platinum-rich asteroid 500 metres in diameter could contain nearly 175 times the annual global platinum output, and 1.5 times the known world reserves of platinum group metals. One of the largest known asteroids in the solar system, 16 Psyche, is a floating chunk of iron, nickel, copper and other rare metals, including gold and platinum. Its value? Around ten thousand quadrillion dollars; annual global GDP is $74 trillion.”

Now that’s what I call post-scarcity. There is a catch, though:

“…how would investors… get a return? One solution would be to follow the example set by the diamond industry after the discovery of South Africa’s abundant reserves: artificially restrict the supply, and sell mined space commodities at a price marginally below the cost of production of any mine on Earth…”

Bastani is a man of the radical left, and believes the state would have to stop the capitalists from denying us the post-scarcity economy we deserve:

“…there is an alternative model of collective ownership that would see the price of precious metals and minerals, all with multiple applications, drop close to zero. Combined with the emergence of general artificial intelligence and ever-cheaper renewable energy, it would be the basis of what’s become known as ‘fully automated luxury communism’…

“As outlandish as it sounds, space exploration, like AI and renewables, is an important terrain on which a rising left must fight.”

I’m not as confident about our ability to mine asteroids before this century’s done, but Bastani raises a genuinely interesting question: would capitalism stand in the way of a post-scarcity economy?

The first thing to say is that capitalism has done a pretty good job of getting us this far towards post-scarcity – which, compared to the pre-capitalist age, is very long way indeed. Furthermore, capitalists have found continually creative ways of using increasingly plentiful commodities like computing power, food calories and clean energy to develop new and sought-after products and services. Abundance provides a foundation for new and profitable business models that sustain the cycle of investment, innovation and profit.

Many of the world’s biggest companies today – such as Amazon, Google, Facebook – didn’t even exist 30 years ago; and typically their business models are about making once scarce resources cheaply or freely available to consumers.

Capitalism can, therefore, maintain our progress towards abundance (if only of the material variety). We don’t need the state to seize the means of production.

What we might need the state to do, however, is seize the means of consumption. If robots are doing everything for us then who will earn the wages required to buy the products of unpaid robot labour? It’s another good question, to which I offer an answer here.

The Soviet Union had successfully launched the Sputnik 1 orbital satellite, delighting the world’s radio hams with its signature. Its full name Sputnik Zemlya meant ‘Companion of Earth’. Ultimately, it would revolutionise astronomy, navigation and telecommunications.

Meanwhile, the news from the US that autumn was bleak: A reluctant President Eisenhower ordered the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas to protect African-American children from segregationist fanatics preventing them from attending school.

The missile gap

Eisenhower was relaxed about Sputnik’s launch, though still angry that inter-service rivalries kept the US from reaching space first. Even when the Navy launched its rival Vanguard rocket the following December, it rose only a few feet before exploding. The Daily Mail dubbed it ‘Puffnik’[2.  Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower. The Presidency 1952-1969 (London, 1984) pp. 427-428. Eisenhower thought of consolidating all four services as task forces under the DoD.].

Dictatorships were supposed to be incapable of such technological leaps. But the powerful rocket used to launch Sputnik ramped up American fears of a ‘missile gap’–a fear which would be cynically exploited by John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election–and it exercised professional Cold War warriors who had earlier inflated false fears of a ‘bomber gap’.

In reality, the US had a much larger inventory of nuclear weapons than the Russians – 6,444 bombs in 1957. Even if, in 1961, the Russians had detonated their 50 megatons Tsar Bomba, the world’s most powerful hydrogen bomb, US Strategic Air Command had nearly 2,500 long-range bombers, at home and on overseas bases. General Thomas Powers ensured 134 of them were constantly airborne or ready to take off at just 15 minutes notice. The US had also pioneered aerial refuelling tankers, of which it had 800[3.  L. Douglas Keeney, 15 Minutes. General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (New York, 2011). Curtis ‘Iron Horse’ LeMay took over SAC in 1948, but Powers commanded it from 1957 onwards when LeMay became US Air Force supremo. He would go on to be George Wallace’s running mate.].

The Soviets lagged behind in solid-fuel ICBMs, in part because, after Sputnik, Eisenhower authorised the new Minuteman ICBM (still the US standard). Moreover, the SAC’s B-47s and B-52s could have easily destroyed Soviet ICBMs as they were being laboriously liquid-fuelled at launch sites that US spy planes had identified from 70,000 feet[4.  On this gap theme see Roderic Braithwaite, Armageddon (London, 2017).].

But Sputnik made the Americans fear sudden annihilation from outer space, ‘like kids dropping rocks on cars from freeway overpasses’, as Lyndon Johnson absurdly put it[5.  See Aleksandr Fursenk and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York, 2006) p. 151.]. More importantly, Sputnik subverted American faith in their can-do scientific and technological superiority.

Laika and Gagarin

In their haste to put Sputnik 2 into orbit to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets botched the job. The sole casualty was Laika, a stray dog from Moscow, who could not even turn inside the tiny capsule because of the sensors surgically implanted and wired into her body. After four orbits, Laika was overcome by heat; some months later, she was cremated when Sputnik 2 disintegrated on re-entry.

But this PR disaster was forgiven in September 1959, when the Soviets successfully crash-landed Luna 2 on the moon. On 12 April 1961 it was forgotten completely, as cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth for 108 minutes–the first man to venture into space.

Only 5ft 2in tall–a height requirement to fit the small capsule of Vostok 1, Gagarin’s winning smile helped make him an international celebrity. There is a statue of him in Greenwich. “I can see the Earth’s horizon. It has a beautiful blue halo. The sky is black. I can see stars, a pretty fantastic view,” he reported from space. It would not be until 1969 that the Americans landed two men on the moon, eclipsing the Soviet achievement.

Khrushchev’s vision

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, an uneasy collective governed the Soviet Union. But in the wake of Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin’s depredations to a Party audience, he felt emboldened to make himself primus inter pares[6. On either side of the Sputnik launch, Mikhail Kaganovich was exiled to manage a potash mine in remote Perm, Vyacheslav Molotov was posted to the embassy in Outer Mongolia, and Georgy Malenkov to run a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan. Both KGB chief Ivan Serov and the war hero Marshal Georgy Zukov were also bundled into retirement since Khrushchev feared such powerful personalities.].

Khrushchev significantly pruned Soviet forces, shedding millions of men from the ‘green army’. New naval battle cruisers were scrapped since he regarded surface ships as ‘fodder for sharks’. Attempts to build long-range bombers were abandoned, and the plants were repurposed to make missiles, submarines and commercial aircraft. The Soviet Navy could launch ballistic missiles from diesel-electric submarines by 1958, and from its first generation nuclear subs two years later.

The space race was part of a broader concerted effort to propel the Soviet Union into the future, finally realising the technocratic fantasies of the early Bolshevik period[7.  William Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and His Era (London, 2003) pp. 379-380.]. Inspired by the farms of Iowa, Khrushchev moved millions of people to virgin lands in the east that were one and a half times larger than California, though the cold and dust soon eroded any productive gains[8. Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (London, 2017) p. 208.]. Science and technology was a source of national pride to ordinary Russians, notably in mathematics, electromagnetics and quantum electronics. But the country made Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles (100 million are in use) and Lomo cameras while ordinary people had to wait years for refrigerators or vacuum cleaners[9.  For a brilliant blending of fact and fiction on this period see Francis Spufford, Red Plenty. Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (London, 2010).].

Mickey Mouse

When Khrushchev visited the US in 1959, he presented Eisenhower with a replica pennant from the Luna moon landing. That Soviet technical prowess, however, was not so evident in the Chairman’s own mode of transport. The passengers on the giant Tupolev Tu-114 airliner included its designer’s son as a kind of hostage; engineers spent the flight anxiously monitoring the engines for cracks.

The US visit was not a success. The peasant Soviet leader was resolved to be unimpressed by the wealth he witnessed and the glitzy events to which he was invited (though he was furious that American and Soviet security officers prevented him visiting Disneyland). At Hollywood’s Twentieth Century Fox, Khrushchev brightened up to see Marilyn Monroe, but overall the visit was punctuated with outbursts of ill-temper, though reportedly he and Eisenhower got on well in private.

The US president’s 1960 visit to Moscow was cancelled after the Soviets succeeded in shooting down a U2 spy plane overflying Sverdlovsk and capturing its pilot. Ironically, Air Force One was itself being covertly fitted with high-res spy cameras for the President’s visit.

Space did not unite mankind during the Cold War except in a platitudinous sense. The economics of space exploration, though, would eventually bring the countries closer: Nowadays cost-conscious NASA depends on Russian rockets to send its astronauts to the International Space Station and Russian-manufactured engines to launch its own satellites[10.  Ken Dilanian ‘Why Does the US Use Russian Rockets to Launch Its Satellites?’ nbcnews.com 15 November 2015.].