Russia orders Soyuz delays in wake of test mishap, Spaceflight Now
“Outside experts have questioned Russian quality control, but Suffredini said the problems appeared to be unrelated and he expressed confidence his counterparts will get to the bottom of the latest incident, implement corrective actions and move on.”
NASA confident in Russia despite space accidents, Reuters
“The latest accident involved a Soyuz capsule being prepared to fly a new crew to the $100 billion orbiting research laboratory on March 29. The spacecraft was inadvertently over-pressurized during testing, rendering it unsuitable for flight.”

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4 replies on “Botched Test Delays Next Soyuz Launch”

  1. Should a tragedy occur in the next next year or two, critics are going to point to this string of mishaps Russia has been having and ask, “How could NASA have been so negligent to put American astronauts on their rockets?”  Russia’s rocket program is starting to look like Mir in its final years.

    Right now NASA has no choice but to go with Russia or de-orbit the ISS (a non-trivial activity in itself). I look forward to having 2-3+ launch providers.

    1. Roscosmo wants to ditch the ISS.  This whole safety issue is a crock.  I wish congress would wake up and smell the rocket fuel.  Fund commerical to get back into LEO and man the ISS.  Build the SLS and lets get on with it!

    2. We’ve been using Soyuz for lofting our Astros to ISS since long before Shuttle retirement. The “how could NASA have been so negligent…” moment was what? a decade ago? When other craft were not funded. If the shuttles were still flying, their relativley short endurance would limit ISS visits to a few weeks at most. Not the six-month full time stays the Soyuz provides. If shuttle were still flying, would commercial be funded at all? The ideal situation, besides budget increases, would have been to fund commercial, such as AtlasV/Delta craft, years ago, before shuttle retirement. And then retire shuttle to spend that money on CxP or SLS. Instead we picked Ares I, which was supposed to be done before shuttle retirement. Things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to. Now, of course, we look silly for not fully funding CCDev, our current best hope.

  2. You guys are missing the bigger picture.

    Congress is rather silent on this matter.  Best to keep quiet rather than people notice the funding cut to CCDev and draw attention.

    Jim Oberg is turning out to be (unfortunately) very right on Russian reliability.

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