NASA formally notified Congress Aug. 5 that it is issuing a $490 million extension of an existing contract to purchase Soyuz seats from the Russian space agency, saying that it was forced to do so because of cuts in the agency’s commercial crew program.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...