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Old October 14th 18, 07:23 AM posted to sci.space.policy
William Elliot[_4_]
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Posts: 86
Default Soyuz Rocket Launch Failure Forces Emergency Landing of Soyuz!

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 years the US been dependent upon Russia for ISS access.
That's how reliable US is.

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.