I'm pretty confident that they'll get the booster flying again. The Soyuz rocket and capsule have a lineage four decades deep, so I'd bet on a manufacturing flaw rather than a design defect. If you don't have to go back to the drawing board, you just inspect the the faulty part extra carefully next time, and fly the thing.

The thing that perhaps we really ought to be concerned with is whether the ISS, if evacuated, would be considered abandoned under the laws of salvage, and legitimate pickings for a Chinese prize crew. Or any crew, even one launched by a private corporation.

In a related vein, at what point does the United States give up its ownership share in ISS? I suppose if we keep paying our dues we can keep up the timeshare, but you can see it coming: If we stop participating in the Space Station--if we can't even show up for work, so to speak--inevitably a budget hawk will demand to know why we're paying anything at all. Or our long-suffering partners might just ask the same thing.

And as a practical matter, possession is nine tenths of the law, and never more so than when it comes to a state hanging on to extraterritorial property. Once upon a time nations that couldn't enforce possession of overseas colonies lost them. Now we have to worry about space stations.

At least we're living in the future...