Russian Space Agency Determines Cause of Soyuz Crash

An anonymous reader writes "The online version of the San Francisco Chronicle reports the cause of the loss of a Soyuz rocket in August. The Russian Space Agency, ROSCOSMOS says a manufacturing flaw led to the failure of a gas generator."

This is good news.

[conspirator23]

In fact it is better and faster news than many people feared. It suggests a by-the-numbers path to return the Soyuz to service. In turn, this dramatically lowers the risk that we will need to evacuate the ISS and suffer any negative consequences associated with that.

(We now return you to this thread's excessively random spew.)

Re:There are no accidents

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap or reliable. Pick one. Welcome to capitalism.

Re:Let me be the first to say

[mug funky]

how are american lives more important than russian lives, or any other?

Loss of russian skilled workers to blame.

[Anonymous Coward]

Space Failures Raise Uneasy Questions [themoscowtimes.com] - The Russian Space Industry starved after the fall of the USSR. The workforce aged and retired and there was a lack of new hires due to non-competitive pay scales with industry. Now the agency faces a lack of skilled workers that will only worsen as corruption has devoured all capital investments. New engineers and technicians take years to become proficient, it's not like working at you're local 7-11 as some folks seem to think.
You can draw a direct parallel to the US human spaceflight program. Now that the shuttle program has ended the majority of laid-off contract workers (i.e. USA, BOEING, Rockwell) are dispersing out of Brevard County - Florida to other aerospace jobs across the United States. Any future US manned space program will spend much treasure and likely a few lives to restore the talent that was let go, APOLLO all over again.

Re:There are no accidents

[brillow]

What are you talking about? The Soyuz rocket has the best track record of any launch vehicle. It's an incredibly well-designed rocket which has not been improved in over a decade.

Re:There are no accidents

[damburger]

The Soyuz rocket has redundancy upon redundancy, to accomodate for just this kind of manufacturing error, and normally it works as evidenced by the incredible reliability of the rocket. Consider the fact that, when first introduced, it had to deal with 1960s Soviet quality control on its parts. Sometimes, of course, even the best precaution fails. You can't draw conclusions about the entire state of Russian society based on a single wonky gas generator...

Re:There are no accidents

[KDR_11k]

Communism produces neither.

Re:There are no accidents: JUST SAY IT

[Anonymous Coward]

You DO know you can say shit on slashdot, right? I mean fuck, man! There are no word police here.

Re:Let me be the first to say

[kevinNCSU]

Americans dying on an American rocket or Russians dying on a Russian rocket is a tragedy but Americans dying on a Russian rocket or vice versa is a political and diplomatic nightmare that would seriously damage this planets space efforts for generations.

Re:There are no accidents

[rim_namor]

Dude, Communism produced Soyuz, but where in the world did you get an idea that it was cheap? The entire country was put to work to push the space race forward, the only 'cheap' part of it was labor, which was actually free, as in - slave free labor.