Why is the ESA still using Russian rockets? After the recent showing of the Russian Proton-M blowing up all the time (including taking out Europe's AM4R sat) its asinine they keep using Russian designs to do this.
They have alternatives with their own Ariane rocket and US rockets. Maybe its time they started not using the lowest bidder and went for quality instead. How many man hours were lost just now? Just incredible.
Also, I wouldn't put it past the Putin regime to do a black-ops on these Soyuz designs to weaken Galileo to give their GLONASS system a huge competitive advantage.
Proton aside, Soyuz is singly the most reliable launch vehicle on the market, since the retirement of the US Shuttle and ULA Delta II. It has both the longest track record of anything out there, if you look at the entire R7 family, of over 3500 flights. It also has a success rate of over 98% over the past thirty years. The Delta II reached a similar ratio, but over only 140 flights. Also, the Soyuz is one of only three vehicles that Arianspace is able to launch from French Guiana.
Edit: I should probably note, Delta II isn't completely retired yet. So the two are sorta kinda still tied. I've been a Delta II fan for a while, but they're down to selling off stockpiled hardware. Prices kinda went through the roof with the GPS contract going to EELVs. It's a shame, since it's the end of a fairly good track record. But we still have Soyuz.
Oops... Edit 2, since I can't edit this anymore. R7 has not flown over 3500 flights in 60 years, it's flown ~1600 flights. 749 on the model retired in 2011. http://astronautix.com/lvs/soya511u.htm
You're forgetting that it's Russian rockets that constantly refuel and resupply ISS, without any problems. It's just a selection bias.
> Also, I wouldn't put it past the Putin regime to do a black-ops on these Soyuz designs to weaken Galileo to give their GLONASS system a huge competitive advantage.
I wouldn't put it past him anymore that I would put it past Obama. The US would have exactly the same reasons. Believe it or not, Putin is not some sort of evil monster from hell the western propaganda tries to paint him recently, and the US is not some white knight following superior morality. One could actually reasonably argue that the US is more evil than Russia on the international scale. Anyway, the most probable explanation is still "space is hard".
>. Anyway, the most probable explanation is still "space is hard".
I never said it wasn't, I was just exploring the possibility. My point is that a lot of international relations, and this includes spaceflight, works on trust. When one country is habitually lying to the world and receiving sanctions from its partners, that trust is lost. Especially since we know Russian leadership has no problem with politicizing space, namely, its sudden turn-about on RD-180 and early retirement of its part of the ISS. So we know they are willing to be petty in the world of spaceflight for completely unrelated reasons (Ukraine).
Thanks for the downvotes and putting words in my mouth though.
> When one country is habitually lying to the world and receiving sanctions from its partners, that trust is lost.
Well, the magnitude of this is still debatable, once you move outside the america-centric western propaganda bubble. But still, since we're comparing those two nations, I'd like to remind you that United States Government keeps lying to everyone 'both foreign and domestic', so we have exactly equal reasons to trust the US and the Russians.
Fortunately space is usually free of politics, but since you brought that up... did you know that it was NASA who first said (or likely was forced to) to Russians: "hey, we don't like what you're doing with Ukraine, so from now on, we're not going to space together"? The "sudden turn-about on" military engines and ISS prolongation on the part of Russians was merely a reaction to a completely asinine politicization of space by the US Government.
So to fix your sentence, what we know is that "the United States leadership has no problem with politicizing space".
But hell, of course it's the Russia's fault, Holy Freedom Loving America never does anything wrong, or stupid.
Disclaimer: I'm not pro-Russian. I'm anti-stupid-prowestern-propaganda and the usual assuming that America is Good, Russia is Bad. I think we're mature enough to not base our thinking on cold war-era action movies.
You're kidding me, right? Have you ever seen the map of the world?
Geography aside, were Russia really "almost too small to matter", it would have already been bombed by the US over Ukraine for some vague reason like "preventing evil regime from stopping people seeking true democracy".
If you take off the rose-colored, western-biased glasses, you'll see the US as a country that invades and destroys other nations for random made-up reasons like "they have WMDs!!!111oneoneone", that terrorizes innocent citizens of nuclear powers by constantly killing whole families at random by drone strikes, is probably single-handedly responsible for the rise of ISIS and basically looks like its trying to destabilize the whole world to fix its own economy.
So yes, I'll happily listen to USGov saying how Putin is evil, when they stop droning the living shit out of Pakistan.
> were Russia really "almost too small to matter", it would have already been bombed by the US
Russia isn't very important in terms of its economy. Its GDP is ninth in the world[1], just behind Brazil and just ahead of Italy. Most of its GDP is from natural resources. If they didn't have oil and gas nobody would give a fuck about them.
Except for the elephant in the room. NUCLEAR WEAPONS. They have a very formidable arsenal. IMO that's the biggest reason that Ukraine isn't already part of NATO and why the West doesn't already have combat troops in Ukraine. Well, at least if Bush were President. I think Obama's foreign policy is a little bit more nuanced than Bush's was.
Vlad has recently [2] reminded us of his nuclear weapons.
You are right, of course. The big part of why they matter is their nuclear arsenal and fossil fuels (which, what some people in my country happily forget, is what we use to warm ourselves in the winter; but I guess it's excusable, we have summer now after all, and who ever thinks six months ahead...).
I'm not claiming that they're not doing evil things, just that they're not the only ones, and if one starts arguing for possibility of them being so evil as to sabotage a civilian space missions, one would do well to consider other actors to which exactly the same arguments could apply.
They have alternatives with their own Ariane rocket and US rockets. Maybe its time they started not using the lowest bidder and went for quality instead. How many man hours were lost just now? Just incredible.
Also, I wouldn't put it past the Putin regime to do a black-ops on these Soyuz designs to weaken Galileo to give their GLONASS system a huge competitive advantage.