(Nicholas Fitzpatrick) writes:

and perhaps most disturbingly:
"This Soyuz is still technically susceptible to the same type of problem
but the Russians believe they understand it well enough and they've
trained the crew ... so they can possibly do something manually to
override the computer," (the NASA spokesman) said.

Does this meet the safety standards for NASA? All these qualified
statements sound very fishy? Should they have sent up TMA-3 with
a single astronaut, and done an evacuation? (presuming the problem
is fixed with TMA-3), and then placed the new crew with TMA-4?

No, that is a ridiculous suggestion.

The technical issue of returning on TMA-2 is not as serious as some
people would like to make it. Ballistic re-entry is a safe
contingency flight mode, the astronauts are trained for it and it
poses no additional risk -- it is just less comfortable.

The serious issues I see are that
1. Russian QA did not discover the problem before the first flight.
2. Russian mission control failed to properly track TMA-1 and had
(at least for a while) no idea where the vehicle was.

--
Manfred Bartz