The guy is a NASA construction engineer and he doesn't seem aware that after Challenger, it wasn't technically possible to add parachutes and an escape pod in place of the flight and mid-deck.

Looks like when one is a specialist in one field and is asked questions on another one, answers will too often be quite wrong! There is plenty of litterature about those Shuttle issues, though.

But if there are not going to be any Shuttles for a long time or even none , why can't NASA make a deal with the Russians? Why not cooperate : Have them build more Soyuzes or even develope the Kliper together! (Isn't this kind of technology sharing done with Sealaunch?) That law preventing cooperation with countries selling technology to Iran hurts the US much more than Iran!
Or else, don't cooperate, but then hard consequences follow.

Raoul