In article m,
says...
The thing that I find most troubling though is that even when
commercial crew is flying, NASA will still fly astronauts on Soyuz
in exchange for flying Russian cosmonauts on commercial crew.

Why?

See below.

If I had to pick between the two, I
would not choose to fly on Soyuz.

If you look at Russia's overall rate of launch failures and Progress
vessels not making it to ISS (three so far), it's pretty damn clear that
this recent Soyuz failure with a crew on board isn't a one off failure.
It's part of an overall trend in failure rates. Soyuz, as a launch
vehicle, is nearing the end of its life and the new launch vehicle meant
to replace it is literally taking decades to come online. I have little
faith that this new vehicle will be safe since it's been a long time
since Russia has successfully fielded a new crewed launch vehicle.

NASA is overly cautious, IMHO, to the point that they're now dragging
out the schedule of commercial crew due to "paperwork" and safety
concerns raised at the last damn minute. Still, I would hope that
commercial crew is safer than Soyuz and the Russian space program in
general. Falcon 9 and Atlas V taken together have had very few
failures. And the failures that Falcon 9 has had have been investigated
by NASA as well as SpaceX and those failure modes (and more) have been
addressed.

Soyuz may still be considered "good enough" by NASA, but NASA still has
far less insight into what Russia does than what they have with SpaceX
and ULA. At this point in history, I would much prefer a ride on a
Dragon 2 or Starliner than a Soyuz.

Jeff
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