"From 2006 to 2024, NASA purchased 68 seats on Soyuz spacecraft for over $3.6 billion to transport astronauts and partner astronauts to and from the station," the document states. Since the beginning of station operations, NASA used the Space Shuttle for astronaut transportation. After its tragic disaster and retirement in 2011, the agency relied solely on Soyuz spacecraft. For about 10 years, the only place on Earth from which a person could fly into space was Kazakhstan's Baikonur. After 2017, when American companies initially planned to start commercial crewed flights, NASA signed a contract for 12 additional seats on Soyuz spacecraft at a cost of approximately $1 billion (or an average of $80 million per seat). In July 2022, as part of the ISS program, Roscosmos and NASA signed an agreement on cross-flights of Russian cosmonauts on American Crew Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX and American astronauts on Russian Soyuz MS crewed spacecraft. In addition to the USA and Russia, China currently possesses crewed spaceflight technologies. The European Union is unable to independently launch a European into space.