Jeff Findley wrote on Fri, 26 Oct 2018
06:36:37 -0400:

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.


Yeah, but we kind of know that and don't have a lot of choice but to
live with it. Should I point out to Mayfly that this lines up exactly
with my 'guess' that he was trying to excoriate me for?


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.


Yeah, but then you wind up with silliness like the year slide in the
Vulcan schedule out to April of 2021. I knew they wouldn't be able to
meet their original schedule when it took them so long to select an
engine.

I'll just note that on this year's launches there has been one R-7
failure and one Ariane 5 failure. It looks like they've been running
one R-7 failure a year for the last several years.


--
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to
live in the real world."
-- Mary Shafer, NASA Dryden