"Explorer8939" wrote in message
om...
(Derek Lyons) wrote in message
...
(Explorer8939) wrote:

(Derek Lyons) wrote in message
...

Soyuz has on several occasions failed to deliver it's crew, although
Progress never has failed to deliver it's cargo. OTOH Progress has
collided with it's target at least twice.

When was the last time that a Soyuz failed to deliver its crew? What
are the chances that that failure mode would be repeated? When was the
last time that a Progress collided with its target using the standard
Kurs rendezvous system?

So why are focusing on the failures that haven't happened recently,
and ignoring the ongoing failures that *have* happened. That's a good
way to get people killed.

Derek, the last time a Soyuz failed to deliver its crew to a space
station was ^1983* and that was back in the day before manual Soyuz
rendezvous was possible. The last Progress collision using standard
Kurs rendezvous was *never*. Please don't trying avoiding the actual
facts.

Umm, he's not. He's simply not redefining them. Who cares what the last
Progress collission using Kurs was. What you care about is the last
collision in general. It crippled an entire module in Mir.

Note that the Columbia was a reusable vehicle that encountered a new
failure mode.

Actually no. It encountered a failure mode in a new way. (i.e. they had
known about foam strikes for years. Whether or not they considered the RCC
vulnerable is actually irrelevant as they weren't considering it a problem
at all.) Had they approached the problem with the seriousness it deserved,
Columbia would still be flying.


You are trashing the Russians for Soyuz and Progress failures that
either never happened, or happened in the Breshznev era, and lauding
NASA designs that failed this year. Please don't let your biases cause
you to see fatal flaws where they do not exist.

I'm not trying to speak for Derek, but he's not. He's simply trying to
remind you that Soyuz/Progress is not nearly as good as some folks would
like to think it is.

The truth of the matter is, spaceflight, Russian or American is just plain
risky.




D.
--
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