The first-ever ballistic descent of a crewed capsule took place today, when the second-stage booster of the launch rocket suffered an emergency shutdown. Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos and Nick Hague of NASA were aboard; both survived the descent and are reported as being in good condition.
AP:
2 astronauts safe after Soyuz forced to make emergency landing
So that's what I heard a fragment of on the radio this morning. Wow.
Thanks for posting that, Rob.
A succesful failure, so.
If that'd been a Vatican space program, neither astronaut or cosmonaut would've survived.
Either way, there's something a little bit rotten with the Russian space program. It's hard to escape the sense that quality control is starting to go out the window - either because of management growing fat on its laurels, or a workforce too afraid to report any issues that occur in production in case they get utterly shat on by a fat management desperate to scapegoat someone to hide their own ineptitude.
Yeah. Two missions in the same year, in a program that's supposedly using mature technology. Something's wrong there.
It's probably just old technology, much like the space shuttles which NASA phased out because they were too dangerous or expensive.
Just because technology is old doesn't mean it's dangerous. It's how its used that makes it dangerous.
As mentioned before, the Soyuz system is a mature one - its well understood and robust. There are no undocumented features, and thus far there seems to have been no gremlins left in the design.
This, more likely than not, was a manufacturing defect - one in a process where quality assurance program should not have failed because they know damn well what a defect will do. We just saw it happen.
Epsilon may have meant old as in 'they've been reusing that piece of equpment for 20 years and it's wearing out'
Possibly... but the Soyuz rockets are single-use, IIRC.
(10-13-2018, 04:14 PM)robkelk Wrote: [ -> ]Possibly... but the Soyuz rockets are single-use, IIRC.
Yes, but is the
factory single use? Wear and tear doesn't just happen to the final product.
(10-14-2018, 03:25 AM)Epsilon Wrote: [ -> ] (10-13-2018, 04:14 PM)robkelk Wrote: [ -> ]Possibly... but the Soyuz rockets are single-use, IIRC.
Yes, but is the factory single use? Wear and tear doesn't just happen to the final product.
Generally, a good QA program renders that a moot point as the finished product is that which is inspected.