Since 2011, when NASA concluded its final Space Shuttle flight, the US has heavily relied on the rockets as a means of conveyance to the ISS. NASA forks out in the order of $70.7 million to the Russian space agency Rosaviakosmos per seat on a Soyuz capsule. All parties, notes Marco Cáceres of the Teal Group, are happy: Rosaviakosmos gets some cash and NASA gets to have its astronauts on a space station that cost the US tax payer $100 billion.

“It’s dismaying that NASA officials would be directed to use this crisis to score domestic political points on behalf of the White House.” Marco Cáceres, senior analyst and director of space studies at Teal Group, is also perturbed. “It sounds like they are trying to use the crisis [in Crimea] as a way to increase NASA’s funding,” he says, “but it’s a disingenuous way of making the case, especially since there are a lot of other good reasons to increase NASA’s budget.” Currently, the agency’s budget is just under $18 billion — a level of funding that the agency has maintained more or less for the last six years. “NASA is extremely underfunded as it is,” Cáceres says. “Any recent increases have been barely enough to keep up with inflation.”

Cáceres says he is more concerned with NASA’s prediction that the agency will be able to launch from US soil as early as 2017. Even with a marked increase in NASA funding, he says, the likelihood of a US-based launch is minuscule because NASA doesn’t currently have access to a viable means of transportation to the ISS. “There really isn’t any great option in terms of a vehicle,” he says. “Even if you were to increase [NASA's] budget by 10 or 20 percent — maybe even 50 — you still wouldn’t have a good way of getting up there.” Cáceres says that although NASA is developing a heavy-lift rocket system called the Space Launch System, it won’t be ready for a crewed spaceflight before 2021.

Indeed, titanium supply constrictions could become a sore point for companies such as Boeing if more sanctions are applied, several analysts note, meaning at least higher prices for the element. “That is going to be a key concern,” says Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at the Teal Group. The aerospace industry is one of the top customers for titanium alloy products, with newer commercial aircraft using far more than previous generations due to its favorable strength-to-weight ratio. Boeing has forecast it would spend $27 billion on Russian titanium supply, design engineering and services “over the next decades.” In July 2009, Boeing and VSMPO-Avisma, Russia’s largest titanium producer, started a 50/50 joint venture, Ural Boeing Manufacturing (UBM) in Verkhnyaya Salda.

On the negative side, aerospace firms like United Technologies could face higher prices on commodities, especially titanium, because Russia is one of the largest producers of the metal. And if natural gas exports were curtailed from Russia to Europe, that too would increase costs for company operations there. “Its economy is mostly a gas station and a mine,” Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group based in Fairfax, Va., said of Russia.