Satellite Piece Crashes Through Man's Roof 121
PolygamousRanchKid writes "A Siberian resident miraculously escaped serious injury or even death when a fragment of a Russian communication satellite crashed through the roof of his house. A Meridian satellite that was launched Friday from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia on board a Soyuz-2 carrier rocket crashed near the Siberian city of Tobolsk minutes after lift-off. A titanium ball of about five kg fell on to the roof of a house in Ordyn district."
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2, Informative)
YOU find satellite!
(Damn kids trying to do ISR memes these days, get off my lawn.)
Re:Does he get to keep it? (Score:1, Informative)
The military offered them an undisclosed sum, probably a few million bucks, and they said, "Fuck you, we want 56 million, see your asses in court." And they'll probably get at least half of that considering the string of errors led to the crash.
Commercial lift services have to be reliable (Score:4, Informative)
With the age of their lift system, you'd think the Russians would have the kinks ironed out by now. I can understand something new like their Mars mission failing, but five commercial launches in a year?
Those payloads are far too expensive and time consuming to trust to a lift provider with such a poor track record.
Re:There is an important piece of information miss (Score:5, Informative)
1) It crashed in Ordyn district of Novosibirsk region, not Tobolsk which is to the west.
2) There is a Cosmanauts street in nearly every Russian town and from what I hear fragments were discovered all over Ordynsk, so the irony is a bit misplaced here.
I'm too concerned about apparently poor quality control with recent launches. I agree that it's most likely due to loss of experience due to aging workforce.