whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union, and it doesnt happen to China, but its happened twice to the US now.
Why is the US giving Boeing a free pass for this? it frankly makes the US look pathetic. News stations quit covering it once the cat was out of the bag that this isnt a "routine evaluation" and the crew is actually just stranded.
23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?
> whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union
Tell that to Vladimir Komarov who launched on Soyuz 1 despite knowing it was a death sentence because if he refused then his close friend (Yuri Gagarin) would have to fly in his stead.
The rocket had several hundred structural problems and they knew it would fail but they launched anyways.
So he died screaming while he burned to death on reentry and he broadcasted it in the clear so that everyone could listen. And they insisted that his remains be shown in an open casket so that leadership would have to look at what they did.
Or the three backup crew members who flew Soyuz 11 and died of asphyxiation despite the fact that it was a known issue that the cabin pressure valves that led to their deaths did not reliably close automatically. Manually closing them was not part of their reentry flight plan and the only thing they got was a warning from an original crew member to do so because it wasn't safe and they wouldn't add it to the flight plan.
I saw an old documentary (cannot recall where) about the Soviet space program. They could not afford a lot of testing or simulations on the ground but there was immense pressure to make progress, so they would just launch stuff and try to learn from the results, good or bad.
this is, frankly, some pretty generous editorializing.
Komarov was selected to command the Soyuz 1, in 1967, with Yuri Gagarin as his backup cosmonaut. refusing to fly has the same consequence for every space program: the backup flies.
as for the "died screaming" claim, thats some malarkey.
What we've learned: American historian Asif Siddiqi has a transcript of Komarov's final moments in the Soyuz. He got it from the Russian State Archive. It goes like this:
Komarov: Activated, activated, don't worry, everything is in order.
Ground: Understood, we're also not worried. How do you feel, how's everything? Zarya, over.
Komarov: I feel excellent, everything's in order.
Ground: Understood, our comrades here recommend that you take a deep breath. We're waiting for the landing. This is Zarya, over.
Komarov: Thank you for transmitting all of that. [Separation] occurred. [garbled]
Ground: Rubin, this is Zarya. Understood, separation occurred. Let's work during the break [pause]. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. Rubin, this is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over. This is Zarya, how do you hear me? Over ...
From that article...
'"I asked Siddiqi if he thought his transcript had been doctored. He said, "I'm 100 percent confident the transcripts are genuine," though there may be other recordings from other tracking locations.When I showed it to Bizony, he said, "An official Soviet transcript of anything, from the death of a cosmonaut to the birth of a healthy baby boy, isn't worth the paper it's written on. ... Given that we at least broadly trust Russayev's recollection of events, we are entitled to believe that Komarov, for all his discipline as a cosmonaut, would have been entitled to some spitting madness and frustration."'
Certainly that was my first thought when I read "Russian State Archive"
Oh, that's what the OFFICIAL Soviet state archives say! Well, I am certain that they were trustworthy narrators, and I'm sure they would have been careful to make an accurate record of anything embarrassing to the Party.
Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be individually safely mitigated (but not all together) more than a blatant failure on any one person or group in the org's part. Additionally space shuttles had experienced conditions extremely similar to Columbia's time and again without any major damage or risk to crew. It still was a failure but it was a much more complex and subtle form of failure than the Challenger disaster.
But neither of those remotely compares to Soyuz 1 or Soyuz 11. The failure in Soyuz 11 had been seen time and again during trainings and testing but was waived away and the only reason it didn't occur earlier was because of pilots unofficially taking steps to mitigate the issue outside of the flight plan that then weren't performed on Soyuz 11. And the failure in Soyuz 1 was expected from before launch. It wasn't a statistical probability that the team made a risky gamble on (like Challenger) but was a definite death sentence. Soyuz 1 is equivalent to if you had the Challenger failure but on several hundred different parts of the rocket instead of on just one.
Either way the point of my original comment was to dissuade the notion that the USSR didn't have embarrassing crewed failures in space flight, not to try and pick sides on who was worse.
Reading analysis[0] of the damage caused by a foam strike on STS-119 makes the loss of Columbia feel more "on NASA" to me than not. NASA knew a foam strike could be catastrophic and that the odds of a bad strike weren't astronomically remote. It had already happened on STS-119 and only luck prevented loss of the vehicle.
I didn't have that take initially, but the Causality podcast did an episode[1] on it a few years ago that got me into reading more about it.
Read The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker. In manufacturing, it’s always a perfect storm because of the variation of Murphy’s Law that’s usually in effect: Everything that can go wrong, usually goes right.
Oh 100%. Columbia was an organizational failure but it wasn't any one person/org's negligence like Challenger was nor was it a gross disregard/disrespect of the lives of the astronauts/cosmonauts like Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were.
My comment was mainly to address the suggestion that those disasters were equivalent to the gross disregard for life that the USSR put their cosmonauts through.
I'd argue that a private company, ran by an immigrant, that started with private capital, carrying out the launches makes it more American than if NASA had done it.
Russia != Soviet Union. That being said, they've been using roughly the same vehicle for a very long time (20+ years if you only consider the latest gen Soyuz, much longer otherwise). I would hope it is reliable by now.
More than half of Russia's space history is Soviet space history. Russia just happens to be the country that inherited most of the stuff after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Soyuz-U had 765 successes in 786 flights. (97.3%)
Soyuz-FG had 69 successes in 70 flights (98.5%)
Soyuz-2 has 160 successes in 166 flights (96.3%)
Falcon 9 has 362 successes in 365 flights. (99.1%). That includes the partial failure of the CRS-1 mission, which successfully delivered CRS-1 to the space station but released secondary payloads into a lower than expected orbit. It does't include the AMOS-6 fire, which would bring Falcon 9 down 98.9%.
Interestingly none of those numbers is enough to give a significant difference between failure rates in a chi-squared test with p < 0.05 - not even if you pool all the Soyuz variants. Though they do all hit p < 0.10.
Thanks for running the numbers, which I think prove that it's impossible to say that Soyuz is more reliable than Falcon, even if you count AMOS-1 (which feels like it should be counted) and CRS-1 (which I don't).
Jesus please go back to reddit. I was simply pointing out that Soyuz has had a LOT MORE launches than Falcon 9, literally over a thousand more, so no one can in good faith that Falcon 9 is more reliable given the numbers and statistics.
But they can claim, in good faith, that Soyuz is? Im afraid thats not how logic works. Either the error bars are too large to take a position, or they aren't. You can't have it both ways.
Fact remains that Soyuz has over a thousand more launches than Falcon 9 with an average success rate of 98% over all its variants. It's the single most reliable launch vehicle mankind has ever made.
> pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+ launches over Falcon 9
Not the current variants. If we’re integrating everything called Soyuz we may we well do the same with Long March and every American rocket that uses similar engines.
Falcon is widely considered the most reliable platform you can launch on today.
Not just more launches, over a THOUSAND more launches. Soyuz has a 98% success rate. Falcon 9 needs to do A LOT more launches before it can be comparable.
> 23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues
To be fair, that we know of. It's entirely possible that their re-entry vehicles also had issues that they decided were an acceptable risk, and were proven correct - without publicizing them.
>23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?
How sure are you about there being no issues or delays?
It was bad behind the iron curtain, so bad, that in ukraine half a million man are willing to fight and die to not go back behind one. The propaganda posters hanging on the wall, had nothing to do with the reality behind it.
The US has far more deaths per flight than any other nation. There have been 19 astronauts that have died during spaceflight. [1] 14 of them have been American, with the US and USSR/Russia having a comparable number of total launches. The USSR/Russia's most recent fatality was in 1971.
NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization.
"NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing"
This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to maximum, the only acceptable solution is to do what was done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is something that could fail in a new and unknown way, possibly bigger than before.
This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of their inertia and inability to change course. When the penalty for slightly more failure than before (in anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight promotion, you converge on having an organization full of people where this is the only path forward, no matter how much acknowledgement there is that the current situation is broken by every last person involved.
To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is creating a culture where people have permission to fail at least a little before being evicted from it. Your biggest successes will always involve some failures on the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of successes will go with it. It's not that you literally want to break things or that managers should necessarily create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing your company by making it the absolute number one priority above all else.
> This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies.
Not really, because commercial air travel had problems early on, and the FAA approach was to investigate, determine root causes, and make changes to eliminate or reduce the probability of them happening again. Assigning blame or scapegoating was not part of their process (not that it didn't happen in the media). And now commercial air travel is very safe.
Except commercial and amateur air travel seems to now be stuck in a local maxima deeply similar to what the parent talks about, avoiding risk by doing the same thing. There are good processes to improve the safety of existing operations and good reasons to keep doing proven things, but innovation is deeply choked.
See the decades long process of trying to switch away from leaded aviation fuel. Small aircraft are all running engine designs from the 1960s despite huge advances in internal combustion and fuel composition in other applications. Getting a new engine design or fuel mixture approved has proven effectively impossible, so processes have defaulted to doing things the exact same way to avoid risk.
See also the 737 MCAS debacle. Boeing was highly incentivized to keep the 737 flight characteristics exactly the same to avoid needing to re-certify the airframe or re-train pilots they invented MCAS to mimic the old behaviour and didn't tell pilots about it, leading to deadly results. Rules designed to allow change actually perversely made it a better option to avoid change (or at least avoid the appearance of change), so risk behaviour defaulted to do it the same way as before.
When is the last time that China or Russia tried testing an entirely new launch vehicle? It is my understanding, aside from upgrades, they have not really built anything new.
Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has one with 6-100 deaths.
And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960.
I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts here.
China, at least Modern China is extremely risk averse. Basically if anything bad happens (not necessarily a death) the whole team would go through a lengthy close-looping quality management process. It is only after the success of SpaceX that things seem to loosen up a bit.
Why is the US giving Boeing a free pass for this? it frankly makes the US look pathetic. News stations quit covering it once the cat was out of the bag that this isnt a "routine evaluation" and the crew is actually just stranded.
23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?