Russia Tops With 45% of Spacecraft Launches in 2006

knight17 writes "This year was a really good year for space exploring nations, but Russians may be the most happiest among them, because they grabbed a huge 45% of the spacecraft launching market this year. The coming year is also very good for Russian space programs, since next year they will finish the GLONASS navigation project. The US is in second place, and China & Japan in third with six launches each. The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen."

Hybrid receivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if it'll become worthwhile to build a hybrid gps/glonass/galileo receiver to cross-compare data from all three and get better precision...

What language?

[Mister Transistor]

The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen.

This must have been literally translated from Russian. Most other languages are hilarious when literally translated without changing cases or tenses - "Throw me down the stairs my hat".

Re:I work as a NASA engineer on the launch program

[papar]

NASA does rule the scientific field and does the best job in engineering spacecrafts for scientific purposes mostly because you got the bigger budget (but how long?). The Russians have always been superior to U.S when it comes to launching stuff into space and in my opinion they still are. And isn't that what really matters? But hey, maybe that's why the U.S is hurrying up the new Moon missions and replacing the shuttle with the good old rockets. Why on earth did you replace the Saturn family with the space shuttle? Would have it really been too expensive to have them working side by side, the shuttle for the manned missions (repairs, visits to space stations etc.) and Saturn for the bigger payloads. Now that's where the U.S system fails, everything has to be always done in such a high and mighty manner.

Re:I work as a NASA engineer on the launch program

[khallow]

The budget for the Saturn V wasn't sustainable. Neither was the high launch rate (roughly 40 Shuttle launches per year) that the Shuttles were supposed to have. Now, NASA could have done something like Ares I and V back then. Ie, a smallish manned launcher and a heavy lifter designed to be cheaper to manufacture and launch than a Saturn V. But they didn't.