I think I'll pay the Russians $20 million and fly with them.
Now, if NASA would give back some of the $1.5 Billion they spent on "fixing" the problem over the last 2 years, we could all go to ISS with the Soyuz guys.
In other news: Karnak was killed today attempting to get into space. Apparently the Russian techs forgot to switch the gudiance package on the rocket from ICBM to space launch, and his Soyuz capsule was violently deposited in the Mall on Capitol Hill.
The Russians said that all the rescue Soyuz missions for ISS that they had to do for NASA while the shuttle were grounded after the Columbia incident was free to NASA cuz they owed them. Any future missions needed by NASA for ISS cuz shuttles are grounded will have to be paid for.
Now, if NASA ends up having to pay for Soyuz missions like the Progress cargo vehicle cuz the shuttles are bugged does not shake up the agency then nothing will. I'm pretty sure that if you spend $1.5 billion to fix a problem and it's still broken then the issue is not resources, but management and process. They can't even follow their own internal studies and take them seriously. The current foam problem was listed as a risk.
This all reminds of the 1980s when the CIA could not figure out if they had Cold War spies as moles in their agency. So, they had to get the FBI to investigate the CIA to find them.