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Old October 13th 18, 02:43 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Posts: 2,307
Default Soyuz Rocket Launch Failure Forces Emergency Landing of Soyuz!

In article ,
says...


AND THIS JUST IN:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45842731

"Speaking in Moscow, Nasa head Jim Bridenstine said he expected a
December mission to the International Space Station (ISS) to go ahead as
planned."

To me, this points to initial investigation pointing to either a sensor
malfunction when everything was working well, ...


Nope. You really need to avoid giving serious consideration to how
things 'seem' to you or what you think facts might 'point' to. You
are almost inevitably wrong.


... or they already identified
what failed and know what to check on the new rocket before granting it
right to fly.


They know WHAT happened. What they don't know is WHY it happened.


Agreed. And the fact that Russia is still planning on launching the
next Soyuz on time, presumably with a crew on board, is indicative of
how they handle these investigations. They assign blame as quickly as
possible, fix the singular issue which was blamed, and start flying
again as quickly as possible. All other issues are ignored in the
interest of flying again as quickly as possible.

The press even called this a "criminal investigation". The connotations
of this are not good if you are one of the workers who build the vehicle
or one of the people who are supposed to be part of quality assurance
procedures.

This is the polar opposite of what NASA does which is pause everything
for an indeterminate amount of time to allow everyone to review their
systems looking for trends or ways it could fail. This is absolutely
encouraged and not punished. This is why after each major accident,
*many* issues are found, brought to the attention of management, and
these issues are addressed in some way.

Let's not sugar coat this. Russia has had a **** poor reliability
record over the life of ISS. Three Progress resupply vessels never made
it to ISS and the latest one of those was yet another launch failure. I
think they have a systemic quality assurance problem which is partly
driven by cultural differences that make that job very difficult. They
assign blame, shoot the messenger, whatever you want to call it instead
of encouraging an environment of continuous improvement.

For ISS this is a good thing, because it means it very likely won't have
to be de-crewed for any length of time. This reduces the chance that
ISS will break when it is without a crew and can't be fixed remotely.
So this increases the chance that the ISS program will continue to
succeed.

But, this is a bad thing for the safety astronauts who have to use Soyuz
vessels to get to/from ISS. They don't really know what might happen
next because Russia just fixed that one thing that went wrong and
immediately started flying again.

Jeff
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