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Russia Botches Another Rocket Launch
astroengine writes "Three hours before a new crew arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, bringing the outpost back up to full staff for the first time in months, Russia racked up its fifth launch accident within a year. A Soyuz-2 rocket carrying a military communications satellite failed to reach orbit after blastoff from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia. The botched launch is again due to an upper-stage engine problem."
No more vodka for ruskies!
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The summary reads like an angry teenager implying that they could do better.
Really? Do yo have any idea how hard it is to actually manage launching something like that in to space? We should be more amazed when everything goes right and a rocket actually makes it there. The rocket failing is, of course, not a good thing... but at least they are trying in the face of failure, instead of giving up and whining about for a decade like the US did after the shuttle disasters.
Launching a rocket into space is a marvel of just about every discipline involved.
... if USA didn't ditched the Space Shuttle program too soon...
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Couldn't the submitter couch the phrasing in something sympathetic. Yes, it's the Russian's 5th failed attempt, but rocket science is...rocket science. It's not easy.
A lot of Russians put effort in trying to get it right. Why verbally piss on them like that?
Disclosure, I'm American.
Since it was a military satellite, they can destroy as many of them as they want, we don't need them to be able to find an excuse to NUKE.
sudo mod me up
I would actually call this a partial success, since usually when an American rocket "fails" it tends to explode horribly but I guess that is the down side of using two huge solid boosters on your rockets.
P.S. American here
Industry Analysts say the Russian space program is hot on the heels of the Mexican Space Agency.
The US military superiority complex overlooks effective tactics in chess game of a post-soviet cold war space program.
An anti-counter-missile-assault-defense testing propaganda free press strategy that masquerades as a failure of Russian technology.
The "Bay of Possums" or Sputtering Sputnik Space Race
FTFA:
"There is aging of many resources. We need to optimize everything. We need to modernize," Popovkin said.
"It’s also aging of human resources," he added. "Given the troubles we had in the '90s, quite a lot of people left and nobody came to replace them."
Maybe some of those things should be done before you just fire off another rocket. Those sound like serious, deeply-rooted issues. To do "rocket science" you need "rocket scientists" and apparently quite a lot of them have left the program.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Science? These problems sound like engineering issues. Did the US brain drain all the engineers in Russia?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Bad times to be an astronaut... i'd shit my pants
The U.S.A. has recently approved cyberwarfare. Perhaps, this is the reason why your launch failed.
I hope this information helps your investigation of the failure
Yours In Peace and Space,
K. Trout, Psychonaut
I was somewhat surprised at the tone too when I read the story earlier.
Wouldn't that be ironic: they end up using American rockets to launch unmanned missions, and the US is using Russian rockets to launch American astronauts.
Table-ized A.I.
It seems most people see launching things into LEO is routine but talking with people who actually do the work (instead of armchair QB and paperpushers on the upper floors), rockets are very complex with so many parts and components. All (with exception of items covered by redundancy) must work in order to achieve speed and altitude to sustain orbit. Are they scaling back someplace that impacts quality? Of course USA hasn't had big failures with human carrying vehicles since 2003 (but then we don't fly such anymore).
Sorry, I cannot come up with a "In Soviet Russia..." or a car analogy. But this thread is just begging for one.
mfwright@batnet.com
Really inappropriate word. This shit is really hard.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Nothing seems to work quite right these days, does it? The Russians can't launch rockets from a family of launch vehicles that has over half a century of heritage. The currency of continental Europe is on the verge of collapse and the French and Germans are near powerless to stop it. Stimulus packages on top of bailouts have failed to make a dent in a global crisis that has now been going on for three fucking years.
Do we have some kind of species-wide dementia or something? Why can't we do stuff anymore that we used to be able to do?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Being, more or less, bombs with a big leak at one end. I am amazed every time one burns out before it blows up.
The only access to the ISS is via the Russian Soyuz, right now, and this will remain the case for at least 20 years - the time it'll take for a functional Shuttle replacement to be designed, built, tested and launched given the current available funding (or lack thereof), the very limited number of rocket designers in the US (rockets are updated regularly, but when was the last time the US actually invented one from scratch through to completion?) and the extreme age of all existing launch facilities.
If a Soyuz carrying US astronauts reaches orbit but cannot dock with the ISS, the astronauts will be stranded. There's no rescue service possible. (Even with the Shuttle, there was a case where Russia almost did lose a Soyuz capsule with astronaut in space - it would have taken far too long for a Shuttle to have been readied and the altitude would have made it extremely difficult if not impossible.) More likely, if a stage failed, the rocket would be remotely destroyed along with the crew. Or it would smear itself over the landscape with much the same effect. We're increasingly aware that space is unsafe, but nobody is willing to stump up the cash to make it safe enough. It would also require total trust and cooperation between the US and Russia - and that would be political suicide for anyone in either country to suggest, let alone try.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
American astronauts die on Soyuz launch to space station.
then...
America stops sending Astronauts via Soyuz, since america has no other option it stops sending astonauts to LEO at all
As we all should be aware, there is some science being done in LEO, but we really need deeper space human missions but NO government has the balls or money to start or complete such a project.
Will we really ever get off this planet? Probably not but we need an off-site backup of humanity as life on this planet is far to fragile. Or perhaps is humanity not worth the transmission cost to back-up?
Three times is enemy action.
Deleted
There are always problems with any Space Travel. The Rocket is nearly 50 years old for gods sake! NASA knows that they cannot continue with their space program or shuttle due to the amount of space debris it creates and this is a serious problem for all craft.
Most people are not told about the knocking out of satellites and the threats. But the international space station is just a piece of space junk. Either way you shall see the Russians' excel in space travel.
NASA needs to get a grip and tell the truth! The Russians are not afraid of telling the truth; besides if you want 6 people back to Earth in May 2012; I edge my bets that in February 2012 there is an emergency and they all have to bail out of the ISS.
As always everything regarding space travel is risky.
I have said enough but hope it does not come to the bailout in Feb!
All cows eat grass!
If the Russian rockets are having so many issues can anyone tell me why they aren't using JAXA (Japan) or ISRO (India) rockets? Cost issues? Technological limitations? I know the JAXA rockets put up satellites and probes, they put a satellite up about two weeks ago... but I honestly don't know much past that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon
And the math was worked out a long time ago. It's just not practical. In order to go further, the projectile must start out faster (initial velocity) and then the air resistance of the atmosphere becomes higher and higher so you need even more speed.
It's not feasible to fire a projectile to orbit, the math just doesn't work.
want to kill private space in AMerica while sending our launches to Russia. Just amazing. Neo-cons are doing more to destroy not just space, but America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I hope they solve the problem soon
Would the US X-37b be capable of engaging in some kind of sabotage of such launches in the upper stage? Has anyone come forward with such a conspiracy? Is 5 failures in a year a significant deviation for Russia; was it just the previous launch that was an upper stage failure or were other previousl launches similarly affected as well?
g=
Weird - initial captcha said, "disclose"!
That's right I am Flash Gordon. Dispatch war rocket AJAX to bring back his body!
All cows eat grass!
Something had to go and education had already been cut back more than made sense since the 1980s. The space program may have not cost a lot in relative terms but many in politics saw it as something the USA could afford to lose. It's a fairly obvious consequence when even someone like Rumsfeld was seen as an intellectual.
..shouldn't throw stones.. :)
ok, not more vodka on the job please