Another bungled Russian space mission

In latest news, Russia's federal space agency has embarasingly lost the Arabsat 4a communications satellite after equipment malfunction..

english.aljazeera.net...

Could this spell the end for Russia's already struggling space industry?

The Russians seem to be keeping their reputation for second rate electronics!

According to socialists and their friends we must beware the mighty power and superiority of the great Russian machine!

Certainly can't be good for their business...with perfrmance like this customers will be looking to China to launch their satelites..

[edit on 12/06/2005 by kojac]

denythestatusquo,

If your so confident in superior american worksmanship, why don't you sign up for a ride on the space shuttle. One comm sattelite among how many?

Two shuttles out of how many missions and in how many years?

I'll take a shuttle any day they want to give me a seat on one.

Uhh, you do know that Russia is considered the 800 pound gorilla in the launching business, right?

You wanna know why? They sell to all comers.

Russia's motto has always been Quantity over Quality when it comes to most space endevors.

I'll take a shuttle any day they want to give me a seat on one.

So that's two castastrophic failures out of how many missions(not years, it's missions)? The next one I believe is STS-121. So if that means that there were 121 missions, with two failures, hmm, lets do the math shall we?

2 / 120 = 1.6 % Failure rate. Yeah, those are some terrific safety statistics. /sarcasm.

And how many disasters did the Soviets have that never got out? How many did they have that DID get out? I'd still take my chances on a 1.6% failure rate any day.

To keep the per mission costs in an affordable range, I believe the shuttles life expectancy has been exaggerated. It is not so much figuring 2 failures out of 121 or so, it is figuring two failures starting from the loss of Challenger. Based on the reports I have heard recently, NASA has not yet fixed the problem of flaking off insulation material from the main fuel tank. It seems to me that the era of manned space fights ought to be ended.

Manned missions cost too much and do not produce enough information to justify the cost. Geo W‘s space initiative is in the same category as his education initiative - all HOOPLA and no reality. A diversion. As launch vehicles - a show-boating way to avoid reality - they are 10 X the cost of a straight forward launching. Let’s face it, the only place outside Earth we could possibly go in the foreseeable future is the Moon.

Sorry guys, but we are going to have time to solve many of the mundane problems on Earth first. Like how to feed 7 billion people. Going to 8 b. And WATER. Where will we get enough fresh water for the human race? UN stats indicate there are already 1.2 billion people without out a dependable and safe fresh water supply. And sewage. Disposal of waste water is more and more a problem. If whales cannot survive in the oceans of the Earth, how long will it be before man cannot survive on land? Let’s fix Earth before we try to fix Mars. Or even the Moon.

Who is the person who predicted the life expectancy of our industrialized society to be 100 years, and he dated that to begin in 1930. What does the Bible Code or Nostradamus have to say about that? There are enough problems on Earth to keep us busy the next half century. At least.

[edit on 3/2/2006 by donwhite]

What a difference four years makes: In 2001, when Mir plunged out of orbit, it looked as if Russia's space program was going down with it, scraping by on a budget of less than $200 million a year.

Today, boosted by Russia's oil revenue, the government has committed to a 10-year plan for space exploration, funded to the tune of $1 billion a year. That's far less than the price tag for NASA's 13-year, $104 billion plan to return to the moon. But while America's space effort is struggling with safety issues and tight budgets, Russia is now seen as having the world's safest, most cost-effective human spaceflight system.

msnbc.msn.com...

I really think you should go investigate this issue.... The Russian space program is in a entirely different league than the American one.

Stellar