In article ,
says...

Of course, NASA Spaceflight rarely paints less than a perfectly rosy
picture of anything that NASA does, so I didn't expect them to be openly
critical of Russia's launch operations. After all, NASA keeps telling
us that everything is fine and that we'll continue to fly NASA
astronauts on Soyuz. Nothing to see here, just move along.


They seem to have a pretty good handle on what happened and why and it
sounds like a 'one off' issue.


Look at the totality of the "one off" issues they've had in their launch
vehicles over the last 20 years. That looks a lot like a systemic
quality control problem to me. One of the reported causes of this
failure was that the crane crew installing the failed booster bent a
connecting pin on the top connection point. Instead of fixing the
issue, they used lubricant on it and forced the booster onto the launch
vehicle. If this proves to be the cause, it's looking like the Russian
"safety culture" is horribly flawed.

R-7 and Proton type vehicles have been flying since before I was born.
We really should not be seeing so many "one off" failures in such mature
designs. As much as I despise ULA for not innovating, their success
rate has been absolutely stellar over the very same time period.

Jeff
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