Russian space freighter lost

Re:Russian space freighter lost by Freakoi on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @02:46PM (#2922014)

Thank you President Obama for saving the space shuttle program!

After all, it would be idiotic to trust another country with something as important as manned space exploration.

It is equally idiotic to cancel a spaceship program until another one is in the air. What a relief!

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Re:Russian space freighter lost by smithian on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @02:55PM (#2922026)

This has nothing to do with Obama. STS was planned for decommission in the Bush era. Blaming it on Obama is reactionary tripe.

Also, Soyuz is STILL the most reliable launch system on the planet after Delta II, and the most reliable manned system.

In addition this was a failure of a Soyuz-U, not a Soyuz-FG which is used for crew rotation. The QA process on the two is quite different, and it appears (still too early to tell, but it is likely) that this error was a QA failure.

Shuttle needed to be retired to move forward with anything else, as the program costs were too high to realistically move forward with any other development work with the current NASA budget.

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Re:Russian space freighter lost by arethuza on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @03:07PM (#2922083)

Soyuz is so good that Arianespace will be launching it from their Guiana Space Center starting later this year:

http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services-soyuz/soyuz-intro...

This is in addition to the existing Ariane 5 heavy launcher and the new Vega launcher:

http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services/launch-services-o...

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