No. The individuals will work with other like-minded people across the government to accomplish their goals. The party affiliation helps you understand who they will plan to work with and what goals that group will be striving to accomplish. That is ultimately the most important thing to consider when voting: which group will be empowered to advance their goals.

Yeah, reading the article, it sounds like they’ve decided to park at the space station because the parts that malfunctioned during the journey to the space station were not designed to survive re-entry, meaning that they won’t have the opportunity to understand what went wrong with them after they return to Earth. So they’re delaying the departure in order to collect as much information as possible about what went wrong in the first part of the mission. They’re still confident that a safe return is going to happen.