STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: Newt Gingrich is a co-host of CNN's "Crossfire" and will be on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer tonight at 5 p.m. ET. Newt is the author of the book, "Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- It didn't take a rocket scientist to predict that NASA's plan to pay Russia to launch American astronauts into orbit wasn't going to turn out well.

Three years after NASA retired the space shuttle program, relations between the United States and Russia are worse than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Americans have reportedly been paying Russia $70 million a seat to send our astronauts to the International Space Station. That's three and a half times what the Russians charge private space tourists for the same ride on their 1960s-era spacecraft.

Now Russian President Vladimir Putin is reconstituting the Russian empire, and senior Russian officials have reacted to our economic sanctions by suggesting that Americans "bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline."

Newt Gingrich

NASA and our elected officials are to blame for this embarrassment.

NASA has tried to replace the shuttle on its own before resorting to the commercial industry -- programs that were canceled after ludicrous cost overruns and technical setbacks. And worse, politicians and bureaucratic backscratchers repeatedly undermined the nascent commercial space industry, where new American companies are working to do less expensively what NASA was failing to do itself: develop a spacecraft capable of carrying humans into orbit.

Instead of accelerating the creation of a thriving commercial space industry, NASA's second choice -- after its own program failed -- was to pay the Russian government rather than American companies for tickets into orbit.

But now that NASA's funding of the Russian space program has become unattractive politically, its 4-year-old program to hire American companies to send crew to the International Space Station takes on new importance.

Excerpt from:

NASA 'missed chance to revitalize'