russia has a contract for a % of all space station missions, ever since they stole that bong sattelite the russian soace program basically only exists because of it. the us was in a transitional period between old rockets and new untested capsules, they could have sped through testing, or just asked to use a (50 year old) russian soyuz. the soyuz is actually pretty awful, prone to leakage, but it's good enough compared to the untested rockets. my point is, your cope about "new means better" is just that, cope.
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