What is up with the Soyuz making Ballistic reentries?

The crew of the Soyuz capsule that landed in Kazakhstan hundreds of kilometers off-target after an unexpectedly severe descent was in serious danger, a Russian news agency reported Tuesday.

....investigators looking into Saturday's landing had classified it as a "3" on the 5-point scale of seriousness, where "5" would be a critical level. Russian officials were still investigating what went wrong,...

The incident was the second time in a row — and the third since 2003 — that a Soyuz landing had gone awry. The space official quoted by Interfax said that signaled problems with the Russian space program.

source

How is this happening over and over again? What kind of protocol is being followed that something as crucial as reentry attitude and angle is repeatedly out of whack? This needs to get straightened out right away before something catastrophic happens and people die.

NASA seems pretty blase' about it so far. I wonder how they will react if they lose an astronaut. The Russian Federal Space Agency doesn't seem to have any answers yet, either.

Anybody here have any ideas about what is going on?

...and once NASA retires the shuttle fleet in 2-1/2 years, they will be relying soley on the Russians to get all of NASA's astronauts to the space station until the Ares 1 and Orion CEV come online in 2015. That's 4 to 5 years of spaceflights that NASA will be solely relying on the Russian system.

Granted, NASA has had 2 spaceflight catastrophes resulting in 14 deaths, but at least they react to identify and fix the problem. The Russians have repeatedly had problems with re-entry attitude and had other crafts go off-course. If they have problems with basic items such as this, I wonder what potentially fatal details they may have missed.

I was reading the same story a few days ago, and went off on a search to find footage of a landing .

Found plenty of 'after the fact' vids and photos, and a few of the decent with the chutes open, but never could find an actual landing.

Anyone know of any?

This article and some of the replies in this thread awfully sound as if Russian equipment (in this case the Soyuz TMA) is unreliable and not trustworthy enough to take over the shuttle's role in the event that the entire shuttle fleet will be decommissioned on schedule. Why? Could it be that there are some who wish to squeeze out the shuttle's remaining utility by extending its lifetime by a couple of years or until such time that a replacement becomes available?

As I see it, we should not be bashing Russian tech for its percieved failings; instead we should be thankful that that old piece of ruskie junk brought the crew home alive, albeit a bit scared (and sweaty, i imagine).

I don't think the equipment is to blame, per se. There is most likely a glitch or miscalculation in the reentry procedure, when the capsule is adjusted to the reentry attitude. This process is somehow going awry, and the capsule heat shield is not properly oriented to take the brunt of reentry friction.

That can turn into a serious problem in a hurry.

[edit on 1-5-2008 by Icarus Rising]