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Proton-M Rocket Carrying Russia's Most Advanced Satellite Crashes
schwit1 (797399) writes "When it rains it pours: A Russian Proton rocket crashed Friday nine minutes after launch. Considering the tensions between the U.S. and Russia over space, combined with the increasing competition for the launch market created by SpaceX's lower prices, another Proton failure now is something the Russians could do without. Moreover, the Russians were planning a lot of Proton launches in the next few months to catch up from last year's launch failure. Many of these scheduled launches were commercial and were going to earn them hard cash. This failure definitely hurts, and will certainly be used as justification by their government in increase its control over that country's aging aerospace industry."
This is funny to me because even though the Russians beat you in most the early space milestones, the USA finally put a man on the Moon ... by making one giant government-backed project...
While the Russian approach was to set up various competing design bureaus.
Like I said, hilarious.
Last year's failure occurred immediately - it was clear there was a major issue with one of the first stage engines from ignition. This latest failure was in the third stage. That's actually worse, because it's showing problems across the board with different engines in different stages, which would be because of totally unrelated issues. Sounds like either fundamental engineering issues or major quality and control problems (probably the latter).
Better known as 318230.
This is easy to demonstrate. Just look at the health statistics from the rest of the 1st world where government more or less runs it and see how much better off we are then they are. Oh wait.....
Yes, please do look at the statistics of health and life expectancy for countries like Sweden, Norway and Canada.
It's way way above what it is in the US.
I have a surgical joint replacement that doctors here see on the X-rays. More than once they've told me they don't have the expertise to check it out, because US insurance companies would not allow such expensive parts to be implanted in US patients. The US way is to use cheaper parts not built to last, and rely on enough patients dying of other causes before needing replacements for this to pay off.
Also, the US healthcare system is very reactionary and slow to adopt new techniques based on the fear of lawsuits. Treatments can be available for dozens of years other places before you can get it in the US. Laser eye corrections is a good example. It took some 20 years before the US finally got them like other parts of the world.
It's about the dollar, not about the quality of life.