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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."
They ditched it at the right time, the problem is that we let budget cutters prevent NASA from funding the replacement we should have had 15 years ago. I remember in the late '80s seeing speculation about what the next space vehicles were going to look like. It's been over 20 years since then and they still haven't produced a final prototype.
This stuff is complicated, but it's hard for me to believe that they couldn't have produced a retooled shuttle with newer innovations in 20 years time. At very least they ought to have been able to redo the controls and keep the same basic design. It's complicated, but hardly new territory like it was when they built the first shuttles.
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
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?
I think you need an "s" on the end of "replacement". NASA has shut down a staggering number of Shuttle replacement projects over the years. Politicians also caused many of the problems that eventually killed the Shuttle (such as causing the boosters to be chopped up for long-distance transport, removing the escape mechanisms that the original Shuttle design was supposed to have, slashing the budget to the point where the Shuttle was too small to carry the payloads intended and/or needed, etc).
There was an effort to keep the Shuttle program going for a couple of years, but by the time it was in a position to do anything, all the factories had been shut down, all the expertise had been dissipated and all the infrastructure had been repurposed. So the effort came to nothing.
It would have been good if NASA and Russia had been free to work together to get the Russian Shuttle fully operational, but US law prohibited any such international project at the time and still interferes horribly with collaboration with other nations today. You don't do space solo. You especially don't do space solo on a shoestring budget, a packet of airline peanuts and a promise by Government appointees to not blow you up next time.
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)