APOD 1.4 (Discovery Rollout Shadow)

I chose this post because I wasn't sure when they would next post a picture of the Space Shuttle or the International Space Station (ISS), and I wanted to be able to comment on them before we started having to rely on other countries' rockets and shuttles to get to our own astronauts.  In a few months, the Space Shuttle program will be discontinued, and the United States will not have any replacement ready for several years, so there will be a time when, in order to have American scientists and astronauts making observations on the ISS, we will need to rely on either the Russians' rockets or another country's method of getting to the ISS if we want to do anything (from putting them up there, to rescuing them in case of a disaster, to bringing them back down to Earth) in space.  This could be very bad, since alliances can change very quickly if a few bad things happen, leaving us unable to reach our own citizens until we do what the other country wants.