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."

Comments

More government control, that's the ticket

[Teresita]

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."

Because paying folks by the hour rather than by the successful launch is a surefire way to cut Space-X off at the knees. This from the land of the three-man shovel.

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[dave420]

That and the massive amounts of regulation that works directly against the "evil capitalist profit incentive". You picked a really bad industry. Try something with fewer regulations - pogs or Justin Bieber CDs or something.

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[deadweight]

Commercial pilot here: If you think "profit" is why airplanes are safe - I am ROFLMAO x 1000. OMFG you could not be more wrong! I once worked for a place that wanted us to call in on the radio with our registration number insteald of XX airlines Flight XXX so the FAA wouldn't even realize we had paying passengers in our ancient shit-heaps. They were ALL ABOUT profit!

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[Luckyo]

It often comes as shocking to many people in the West, but Soviet aerospace industry was pure cutthroat capitalism to the extreme. Competition between respective bureaus was brutal, far more so than current climate in Military Industrial complex in US for example. That is how they ran away several decades ahead of the West in many aspects of that industry. As a result, comparison to current situation with same industry in the West and assuming that what is suggested here is going to Western style "government lead" model is just nonsense.

Going back to that from the current situation seems like a good plan for the industry in fact. Right now it's massively inbred and corrupt, very similar to industry in the West in the same sectors. This is better than space-x model, this is what it should be - government lead industry that is driven to fierce competition within itself, without the massive overspending that results from need to corrupt government to get contracts and produce profits.

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... you are forgetting that the reason that the airlines have such excellent safety records is due to the strict government oversight of just about every aspect of the industry. Pilot, Fight Attendants, Mechanics... heck, even the luggage handlers have to be certified to one level or another by the FAA. Every, even minor, mishap with a plane is documented in detail by the NTSB.

Yes, if the evil capitalistic profits were welcome to run amok there would be no seat belts, oxygen masks, life jackets, interiors would be of highly combustible materials, and the seats would rip from the floor/collapse in a crash - because all of those things add weight - and weight reduces profits. They are there to make the planes safe - not because the airlines want them there.

Challenger blew up due to political reasons (decision to not-launch (line engineers) was overridden by upper mgt. to make the president look good). Columbia was due to errant assumptions on the part of the engineers at both NASA as well as Lockheed Martin's. 'There is no way this chunk of lightweight foam could possibly cause any damage.' Ooops...

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[deadweight]

One of the reasons the FAA (then CAA) was INVENTED was because planes crashed so often that the industry was never going to become viable. One thing they did pretty early on was prohibit making wing spars out of wood for commercial airliners after some people died because of either rot or termites. Absent that rule there would always be one airline not ticking off the "make spar out of metal" option box and saving a few dollars.

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[gtall]

Yes, it should be the case that any modification to health coverage in the U.S. should not alter any one person's coverage.

Get a grip, of course changing health coverage over a large swath of the U.S. economy is going to generate winners and losers. So you lost, how about the ones who couldn't get coverage before due to cherry picking by the insurance companies that can now get insurance?

Personally, I'd have broken the insurance companies knees. By the way, most of the provisions in the ACA where Republican notions before they became Democrat notions. And the the insurance companies were free to direct that legislation, all in good Republican free market theory. If you didn't get what you expected, blame both parties.

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[arth1]

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.

Re:More government control, that's the ticket

[NoImNotNineVolt]

That's a silly thing to say, and it's obviously false.

*sigh*. You're right, we're living in an era of unparalleled cooperation between the two dominant political parties. The Republicans in the legislature haven't been obstinate for the sake of obstruction at all, no. *sigh*

According to polls, many Americans were opposed to the passage of the ACA; sometimes a majority.

And so this is your rationale for claiming that it was pushed down Americans' throats? That for the most part a minority of Americans were opposed to it? I suppose you're similarly opposed to any other legislation that falls short of unanimous support?

Sadly, it's unlikely that anything interesting will happen this year. I don't see the Democrat/Republican control over our government weakening any time soon. If you expect any meaningful change to come from either side of the same coin, you haven't been paying attention.

Russian lift platform crashes

[Chas]

Russia: Maybe you should use trampoline to get into space.
*BOOM*
America: You know what Yuri? That sounds like a damn smart decision!

Different problem

[Dan East]

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).

Re:Different problem

[pushing-robot]

They're claiming the rocket malfunctioned after entering a region of intense gay-waves emitted from western Europe.

I should probably stop watching Russian news.

Russia never upgrades

[gman003]

It's amazing to me just how ancient most Russian rocket designs are. The Soyuz launcher is literally based on the same design that launched Sputnik, with the addition of a second stage. And even after fifty years of iteration, they still have only a 97.5% success rate with the current Soyuz launchers (Soyuz-U, Soyuz-U2, and Soyuz-FG). That's a full point worse than the Space Shuttle (98.5%), which was a completely new design that didn't have several decades of production testing on basically any of the parts.

Proton is almost as old, dating back to the Soviet lunar program. It was actually first intended as an ICBM, to launch ridiculously heavy warheads (think Tsar Bomba on an ICBM). The changes since then have been fairly minimal, compared to the design changes American rockets went through. One of the biggest features of the latest Proton-M design is "uses less parts made outside Russia". Counting this latest failure, Proton-M has only an 88.9% success rate.

The oft-repeated engineering mantra is "quality, reliability, cost - pick two". Russia's antiquated designs don't give you quality (in terms of efficiency or even lifting power), and they really aren't as reliable as you'd expect from such well-established designs. I can only hope that they're cheap enough that it's worth it - and when you're launching multi-million-dollar satellites, maybe cheaping out on the launcher isn't such a good idea.