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Russian Supply Vehicle To ISS Burns
First time accepted submitter Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "The Russian cargo spacecraft 'Progress' developed problems and burned up in the atmosphere shortly after its launch at 1300 GMT. From the article: 'The Russian space agency said the Progress M-12M cargo ship was not placed in the correct orbit by its rocket and fell back to Earth. The vessel was carrying three tonnes of supplies for the ISS astronauts.'"
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
Just saying...
The Soviets lost Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11 for four dead in space flights.
The two Shuttles add up to more deaths because the Shuttles carried more people than any Soviet or Russian Federation craft.
Michael J. Adams died while piloting a North American X-15 rocket plane on reentry from 50.4 miles up.
Shuttle did 135 launches with two lost craft
Soyuz has done 111 launches with two lost craft
Apollo did 16 launches with no lost craft
Gemini did 10 launches with no lost craft
Vostok did 6 launches with no lost craft
Mercury did 6 launches with no lost craft
Voskhod did 2 launches with no lost craft
US 167 launches - 2 losses
USSR/Russian Federation 119 launches - 2 losses
I like SpaceX as much as the next guy, but there's more to the puzzle. Orbital Sciences, Boeing's CST-100, Sierra Nevada's DreamChaser, ESA's and JAXA's resupply vehicles, and even Orion-reborn (to name a few) are all critical to maintaining a foothold on the frontier.
I think what this should teach us (potentially having our only way to get things and people to the ISS grounded) is that no single solution can be depended on. In addition to the sought cost benefits of competition, we need multiple vehicles because none of them will be perfectly reliable and all run a risk of being taken out of service temporarily and leaving a gap if nothing else is available.
Here are more accurate statistics:
http://space.kursknet.ru/cosmos/english/other/stat_kk.sht
Russia / USSR launched 282 man-flights into space. USA launched 881 man-flights. Thus the fatality rate for Russia is 1.4%, and for USA 1.6%.
China has launched 6 man-flights on 3 launches with a 0% fatality rate.
Better known as 318230.
Which is to say, don't unmanned Progress mission failures tell you something important about the likelihood of manned Soyuz disasters?
Had it been manned, the escape system would have fired and brought the crew back down. As far as I remember that's already happened once on a Soyuz flight and the biggest problem was that the crew had to hide from hungry wolves after the landing.
One of the benefits of capsules is that you don't die just because the wings fell off and you need them to come back down.