A closer look

Despite America's obsession with space dominance, its astronauts must go back to school to master Cyrillic. Because the Russian Soyuz spacecraft was the only reliable taxi to the ISS for over a decade after the Space Shuttle retired, all astronauts were mandated to learn Russian. The control panels, manuals, and emergency protocols of the Soyuz are entirely in Russian, meaning a simple grammar mistake could literally vent your oxygen into the void.