Russia Tops With 45% of Spacecraft Launches in 2006

knight17 writes "This year was a really good year for space exploring nations, but Russians may be the most happiest among them, because they grabbed a huge 45% of the spacecraft launching market this year. The coming year is also very good for Russian space programs, since next year they will finish the GLONASS navigation project. The US is in second place, and China & Japan in third with six launches each. The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen."

Comments

Go, CowboyNeal

[Lord Ender]

Clearly, Slashdot has the most best editors of all the internets.

Re:Go, CowboyNeal

[Anonymous Coward]

>>What are the responsibilities of an editor when he's on a shift?

Slashdot editors are responsible for filling several quotas before their shift is up:

1. At least two but as many as eight posts criticizing Microsoft for real and imagined transgressions.
2. At least one post with a title made entirely out of acronyms.
3. At least one but no more than four pieces of internet-joke-bait, involving sharks, lasers, tubes, snakes, or Russia.
4. At least one but as many as six top ten lists, about any subject.
5. At least two but as many as four posts praising the imminent ascenscion of Linux as the world's primary operating system.
6. At least two posts regarding contemporary scientific achievements or potential future technologies which have an extremely questionable grounding in reality.
7. At least one post speculating about Apple products.
8. At least one post that asks if Google is evil yet.
9. At least two but as many as nine posts that can be tagged "bigbrother".
10. At least one post about the RIAA/MPAA.
11. At least one but no more than four slashvertisements.

Hybrid receivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if it'll become worthwhile to build a hybrid gps/glonass/galileo receiver to cross-compare data from all three and get better precision...

news making

[nettamere]

Ok- so that means that Russia had what - 26 launches or so? I don't recall many of them making the news in the US. See - that is the kind of stuff I want to see make the national news for the masses- not the OMG moment of some political nut job of the day-

Re:news making

[WaZiX]

well, they never blow up or anything...

Maybe they should ask Nasa for some PR advice...

Good. Teach NASA a lesson.

[the_REAL_sam]

Hurray for Russia!!

Perhaps they can teach NASA how to run an economical, yet highly effective, space program.

Arianespace

[Schapsmann]

For those interested, Arianespace toped 5th with 5 Ariane5 (omg 555????) successful launches in 2006. http://www.arianespace.com/site/launchlog/launchlo g_sub_index.html

Re:What language?

[Blakey Rat]

The real question is, "what does it mean?"

My guess is: "Warden, the vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten."

not surprising in the least

[davek]

I am not surprised at all by this statistic. Every few months or so I've been hearning something about russia's space program in the major news sources (like CNN); this while the US space program was completly grounded.

Sometimes, it almost seems like beating the Russians to the moon killed the US space program more than anything else. It meant that we no longer had anything to proove, and could just sit back and watch space-planes evolve on their own. Well, that ain't happening.

What would happen if Russia became the first nation to have a semi-permanent lunar settlement? That I could see happening.