I'm definitely on the side of the Russians in this. It's funny how NASA and the Russians seem to embody the same archetypes as the Klingons and the Federationists in Star Trek. It's hard not to think of the Russians as more like Klingons, less willing to compromise, more determined to mold the universe to them than to adapt to it. I admire that in both Klingons and Russians.

I liked your third paragraph's description of an astronaut casually manhandling a spacecraft to docking. Quite a contrast with the present method of spacewalking in which every second is planned out and practiced months in advance. It's not to say that NASA is being too cautious (though to some degree we all know they are), but more that your vision is about having mastered life in space. It becomes normal and the human brain learns and internalizes adaptations that let us naturally calculate maneuvers in microgravity whose equations are different from those our brains evolved to solve.

On an unrelated matter, I noticed that the browser signature recorded at the bottom of your post shows you have something called "FunWebProducts; SV1" installed on your browser. I want to be sure you're aware it's there, because there are kinds of spyware that surreptitiously infect your browser. If you remember installing something like that, you're OK.