They still don’t know what happened on the Progress failure.
I noted at the time that this could result in a delay of the planned crew rotation on the 26th, and it has. I had a discussion with Jim Oberg on Facebook, and he didn’t think there was sufficient commonality, but he seems more concerned now:
Whatever the conclusions of that report may be, lessons can already be drawn from the accident, Oberg said.
“This and recent similar failures highlight the foolishness of judging mission success reliability based on historical statistics. It’s not just that each launch is a new roll of the dice — it’s a first roll of NEW dice,” he said. “The quality of fabrication and mission preparations reflect the CURRENT human and industrial context, and Russian space industry leaders have been so alarmed by those levels that they’ve repeatedly replaced the Russian Space Agency head with outsiders with nothing to show for it.”
This is a serious issue, and Congress’s response? To cut the funding for a Soyuz replacement.
I’m admittedly naive when it comes to Russian launchers and I’m struggling to piece together the differences between the Soyuz-FG (used to launch crew) the Soyuz 2.1a (which launched Progress). Do those two launchers use the same upper stage? From what I gathered, the Soyuz 2.1a is an evolved version of the Soyuz-FG, but the difference is primarily in the control system.
Not exactly the same, but there’s a lot of commonality, I think.
Soyuz (R-7) has had a lot of different iterations with tiny differences.
AFAIK FG and 2.1a are more or less the same thing except for the last stage.
Another Proton launch failure this morning. The third stage malfunctioned and the satellite failed to reach orbit.
Russia has been struggling with quality control. The number of failures over the last few years has been astounding and I am surprised it isn’t a bigger deal considering they launch our astronauts.
We wouldn’t be letting astronauts ride on any private rocket that has the issues the Russian program does.