Another Proton launch failure
Eight minutes into Saturday’s Proton launch, intended to place a commercial Mexican communications satellite in orbit, the Russian rocket failed and broke up.
The Russian launch failures just continue to add up. At this rate their ability to hang on to their commercial customers is becoming increasingly difficult.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Eight minutes into Saturday’s Proton launch, intended to place a commercial Mexican communications satellite in orbit, the Russian rocket failed and broke up.
The Russian launch failures just continue to add up. At this rate their ability to hang on to their commercial customers is becoming increasingly difficult.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Makes one wonder what the successful launch rate was back in the cold war days when launches were largely kept secret.
BTW. Bob, this latest version of Captcha is terrible. Images are too fuzzy, requires typing an unreadable sentence, you have to identify things containing bread from several photos, etc. I am not a bakery expert.
Question about the possibility to hack into this rockets control system, what is the amount of information available for troubleshooting these failures if the craft is burned up in re-entry, How is it ascertained where in the chain of events this failure happened, and as D.K. Williams said, what was the cold war era rate of failures?
Given the apparent sad state of the Russian space industry do we need to be concerned about the reliability of the Soyuz vehicle? It has an outstanding record but one begins to have doubts. Does NASA have a plan B if our sole source transport to ISS fails? I’d like to see speedup of the American alternatives.
NASA? A Plan? Yeah, it’s call more pork.
Joking aside, Dragon is looking like the only reliable backup and it’s still a few years out. There are the others playing with mini shuttles but I personally would never fly in a winged vehicle in space.
The launch failure rates were much lower back in the cold war days.
The Soviet people still believed their governments propaganda and were far more consciences about their work.
Now they are into their third generation of techs doing the very same thing their grandfathers did on the same production lines. The quality and experience is all gone.
Exactly how much pride could they have in the rocket systems they are working on when their highest tech electronics are bettered by western high school kids home work projects. Or when the best computers they could put on the rockets are bettered by Iphones.
Failures at rates like this could only happen in a failing communist system. Any capitalist system would never tolerate bad workmanship on multimillion dollar projects. There would be far more quality checks all along the production line.
My software guy says that all you need to do is check the box that asks “I am not a robot.” Should be simple. Try again and let me know what you find.