Derek Lyons wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote:

Because it's their spaceship, and if you want to use it, it's up to you.
If you say that you don't want to use it, then go ahead and find or
build a alternative to use. They'll still go up to and down from the ISS
in it, there just won't be any US astronauts on board during those trips.

Nice way to ignore the second half of the statement.


Well, everyone knows that the thing has demonstrated way off-kilter
behavior on a lot of its flights, so that the reliability (particularly
regarding reentry) is pretty poor.
But on three separate occasions (Soyuz 5, Soyuz TMA-10 and 11) it has
gotten into a really nasty situation where it ended up going into the
atmosphere nose-first with the service module still attached, then had
the service module burn off, spun around and still made a survivable
landing. I'm sure the crew on these flight were scared ****less on the
way in, and never wanted to fly on one again, but the fact it could
actually _survive_ something like that says a lot about how tough it is
in a desperate situation; and then of course there is descending into
the freezing lake during a blizzard, doing a successful launch abort,
Having its retro engine malfunction, and a inflight abort that resulted
in it pulling 20 G's on the way down...then rolling down a mountainside
for good measure on landing.
You are measuring it against the Shuttle, when you should be measure it
against something like it in concept, say Gemini or the Apollo CSM.
Both those together flew far fewer missions than Soyuz has, and both got
into some pretty hairy situations that could have ended up with dead
crews, despite their relatively few flights in comparison to Soyuz.

Pat