Dmitry Rogozin on SpaceX Crew Dragon Launch | Hacker News Reader

Dmitry Rogozin on SpaceX Crew Dragon Launch

en.roscosmos.ru

109 pointstosh114 comments

Sadly Russia culturally and technologically is not a successor to USSR. Its space program is in shambles. Soyuz was designed in the '60s and Russia's space program can't offer anything new. That happens when you pay your engineers 150$ per month(floor cleaner at McDonald's makes $250) while Rogozin gets 400k$ per year (that's only the official number...), double of what NASA director makes.

Humanity needs a way to access space and we can't rely on the relics of old Soviet technology for that (no matter how great it was, we are rapidly losing the knowledge of it).

While it's not as extreme, SpaceX isn't exactly known for great engineering salaries either.

There's a difference between a SpaceX engineer not getting paid top-dollar and making below McDonalds janitorial staff wages.

However you are not wrong.

Most people I know would be very happy to own SpaceX stock.

That's not quite the same as an engineering salary, especially if you are not getting stock options. Would be happy to find out that all new engineers are getting stock options though.

However, they definitely perform better then Russian spacecraft engineers, who consider salary $4000/year as very attractive

> Sadly Russia culturally and technologically is not a successor to USSR.

I think that's a very very good thing for all the atrocities that Soviet Russia committed on it's populace and especially the populace of the various Republics.

Exactly what I wanted to say, so I would add some. Thanks to poor performance of Russian space and defense industries, US may consider new Cold War (call it Cold War II) not very seriously, while in 60-70s USSR achievements never let their competitors relax. Maybe it was not that bad in the end, these hardships led to new technological achievements of the time, like Space Shuttle program.

He also mentions the new Vostochny Cosmodrome which has been in construction forever. In 2015 the construction personnel(500 people) didn't receive a salary for 5 months and had to write pleads to Putin on the rooftops of their barracks. That's Roscosmos, you can't build anything while people are starving.

Rogozin makes much much more by the way of taking bribes from contractors.

I'm not sure why Mr. Rogozin is writing in English and in Forbes, but yes this is mainly aimed at the internal audience.

There's a lot of bitching and moaning in certain Russian circles about how the space program is falling behind and OMG Space-X launched a crewed vehicle, we're all doomed kind of thing.

The reality is that of course Space-X is standing on the shoulders of giants (NASA and US Treasury) and that the Russian space industry, like the rest of the country has had a tough 25 years. I was living in Russia in the early 90s and those were dark times. Space was not a priority then and it is not really a priority now although some progress is being made. As an example: a lot of critical industry and launch facilities literally ended up in different countries overnight.

Also Roscosmos is a government controlled structure and well... there's a reason why NASA had to turn to a private company to get things done. ;)

Now he's probably getting a kick from upstairs and feels he has to write up something like this and genuinely feels like some of the criticism from the peanut gallery is unfair. In the end though, as an outsider now, it looks to me like they are doing a reasonable job all things considering.

> genuinely feels like some of the criticism from the peanut gallery is unfair

I agree with this for sure. Yeah, what SpaceX and, to a lesser extent, Boeing, are doing is cool, but there's something to be said for being the "old faithful" of the launch industry. No one else can really hold a candle to the flight heritage of Roscosmos' rockets and crew vehicles. Sure, they haven't fundamentally changed in a long time and aren't new and shiny like Falcon, but they've been flying for forever and are reliable.

Wow, there's so much... negativity in this post by Rogozin. It reads like "sour grapes":

" Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although it leaped with all its strength. As it went away, the fox remarked 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.'"[a]

People who speak disparagingly of the accomplishments of others would do well to apply this story to themselves.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

That's how we know SpaceX is doing a good job competing. Seriously, more than the ESA, and more than Boeing, Russia is SpaceX's strongest competitor. If Rogozin was unruffled and apathetic I'd be wondering if they knew something that SpaceX didn't. The fact that he's upset means that he considers them to be a fully-developed player in the space launch market.

With SpaceX delivering astronauts to the ISS this year, Rogozin lost the last mission type where it was a monopoly. If anybody had hopes that the taxi service would keep them alive even as SpaceX undercut them on delivering mass to orbit those hopes were dashed.

Is that surprising?

Russia and America don't exactly get along, and I can't remember the last time I read anything where Russians employed by the state had something nice to say about the US.

I would say, for many state-employed Russians saying terrible things about the US is a primary responsibility, especially in a Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Thanks for providing that! I had no idea about the roots of that expression.

It sounds like he’s pissed that he’s losing revenue which will affect budget which will affect future development and future competitiveness.

I doubt he didn’t see it coming, and sees competition where he had a monopoly for some years and naturally is upset by it. But airing it out in an unprofessional way...

Is this satire? It appears to be the real Roscosmos website, and yet this press release reads like the response of a child that – in an attempt to suppress tears after being second in a competition – lashes out defensively and throws around insults and excuses.

I'm trying to think of a less demeaning adjective, but the most fitting that comes to mind is "butt-hurt".

This isn't satire. This is the tone Russia employs when talking about anything related to the US. I see this on Russian TV and news daily. It's quite hysterical if you're not used to this kind of "delivery." Russian leadership is very "butt-hurt" and they usually resort to demeaning behavior to feel better about themselves.

My sense is that this is market jockeying.

Before now, and I could be very wrong, the only way to simply buy yourself a seat to orbit was on Russian rockets.... and should the future bring more of this they were probably hoping to be the obvious choice. NASA, even when it had it's own capacity, wasn't a threat since they weren't selling seats and when they failed to have a crew capacity, NASA became a customer.

Now, you have the crew capacity in a private company that is on the verge of being able to offer these services for sale and they have no reason to limit themselves to just NASA. SpaceX owns the rockets, capsules, and know-how... which gets to another point in the press release. The larger differentiator between SpaceX and previous government contractors like Boeing isn't that they aren't both private companies, but that the SpaceX is basically selling a service whereas Boeing was selling bespoke equipment. If Russia wants to be commercially competitive in the service of launching cargo and people... SpaceX seems to be a credible threat and I read the press release as the Russians seeing them as such. Given how competitive SpaceX is for satellite launch services, I can't say I blame the Russians for having concern.

There are few good points tho. For example:

>Our Soyuz MS has proven to be the world’s most reliable spacecraft. We have a unique record of 173 successful flights. Even the three emergencies caused by the carrier rocket failures in 1975, 1983 and 2018 occurring during various injection stages showed its unique survivability due to the launch escape system reliability. By the way, the Soyuz rocket of various configurations has performed over 1,900 launches. And this statistics is the golden trademark. The US engineers have yet to earn this reputation. I sincerely wish them luck.

If SpaceX to launch 5 launches per year it would take 35 years to prove same kind of reliability.

Barring slippage, they're supposed to have three more launches before the end of June, which would put them on track for 24 this year. They seem to be well on their way to matching 173, based on their current record and high flight rate.

Hard to say, but maybe Rogozin means crewed spaceflights, not just any rocket launches. Soyuz had more than 140 flights... don't know where 173 came from, but no, SpaceX isn't going to launch 24 flights of manned Crew Dragon this year, not next year.

I don't agree with ideas of the article :) but Soyuz spacecraft did fly quite a lot of flights. More than Shuttle already, and counting.

> If SpaceX to launch 5 launches per year it would take 35 years to prove same kind of reliability.

I mean, sure, but they've done nine this year so far already, and have plans to launch upwards of 30 by the end.

Yes but the rocket between them is identical, which is historically the most dangerous part of space travel.

You can slice and dice the numbers in many different ways.

Russia is gonna put heavy emphasis on the long history of the Soyuz family. SpaceX is gonna point out things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-09#Air_leak ("A 2 mm hole in the orbital module was discovered, later stated to have been 'hidden with a low-quality patch job.'") and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS-10 ("aborted shortly after launch on 11 October 2018 due to a failure of the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle boosters") as a counterpoint.

Ultimately, Russia can comfortably say "we're pretty good at doing rocket launches". SpaceX is getting there themselves.

They are planning for around 30 launches in 2020, and 50 in 2021

No they are not. Here the matter is crewed launches, and SpaceX isn't going to launch 30 manned Crew Dragons this year, or next year, or these two years together.

The rocket between them is identical, which is historically the most dangerous part of space travel.

Spain should've kept the South America - Cadiz route on sailing ships. They'd have million trips under their wooden belts already, beat that internal combustion engine!

Ah, I see is first time experiencing Russian loss. Is normal response to losing.

I wonder if Russia has indeed just lost the international market for manned space flights.

Well, Dragon looks a whole lot more comfortable than Soyuz, though it hasn't nearly got the same track record yet. And SpaceX is already in the market for space tourism and commercial projects (witness the Tom Cruise movie-in-space thing, which could be seen as either or both).

The current Russian development projects Rogozin describes could flip that back -- but a lot of the speech is how those have, to this point, been moving awfully slowly...

Was there a competition? I assume US will use their own tech if possible even if is more risky to avoid the dependency on Russia.

That would be false, otherwise we would not have retired the shuttle.

There is always implied competition when it comes to space since its something that only the "richest" countries can do, especially crewed spaceflight

I do not see what competition or race US won, I mean US just catch up in a way, they managed to wash the humiliation of depending on Russia but I could not see how catching up is a win.

The race to build a modern crewed vehicle to the ISS. Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orel_(spacecraft)

Rogozin must have been put under serious pressure following the Crew Dragon launch. Note that he does not mention any budget or how Roscosmos is going to address the loss of resources due to NASA and other countries buying less Soyouz seats from now on (ESA's Pesquet is for instance scheduled for Crew Dragon).

I was thinking the same thing, reading this was surreal- I had to re-read passages and double check things to make sure this is a legitimate and not some kind of satire or highly metaphorical thing that went completely over my head. Butt-hurt seems to be spot on.

It is just modern tr-r-r-rend in public statements.

Imagine Mr. Trump writing such a statement. What words/style would you see there?

It's been typical Russian tone for years now, starting well before the last U.S. presidential elections.

You probably haven't heard, but recently mr. Rogozin's personal twitter turned into official Roskosmos one overnight. Utterly incompetent as they are, nobody bothered to read or clean up previous tweets after doing this, so for some time you could see some instant classics like "we are russian! god is with us" or a collage of Putin with a tiger and Obama with a puppy with description "we have different values and comrades"[0], all by Roskosmos with the blue checkmark. Hysterical shit if you ask me.

[0] https://leonardo.osnova.io/7764cddc-938a-b05f-ca43-b131fcbcd...

Despite it being written in English, I think this letter is intended for a more domestic audience.

Comparing Russia to the USA is like comparing potatoes to oranges. One is a child of royalty, chasing their dreams and living the in the lap of luxury while the other is a child of poverty, struggling for most of their life, a fleeting moment of success before their past catches up to them.

I have to double check here because it's ambiguous, but the child of poverty here is Russia, right?

Ask yourself, choosing to live among the two choices and presuming you’re not Snowden, where would you choose to live, if you’re not an oligarch?

If you’re not sure, ask poor Americans, ask a homeless person, ask a recent immigrant.

I will second that ambiguity, having never lived in Russia. My sense is that poor Americans are also struggling, but maybe not as much as in Russia? Can you clarify which is which?

As an immigrant from Russia who regularly visit US, I can relate your "low-end" class to Russian "middle". People called poor in US almost always own a used car, and often some cheap house or trailer. Poverty in Russia means no housing for a family (2-3 families live in one apartment), absolutely no car, which is already considered as middle-class privilege, struggle to buy food for the whole family and don't have access to social lifts to escape this kind of existence.

You can't even imagine. The whole east Russian speaking conglomerate of contries is basically a test to your human nature and survivalism.

Right people can’t begin to imagine why sanctions against Russia don’t work. Subtracting from near zero leaves them at near zero. Moar sanctions don’t bother them as they are already used to living with the bare minimum. It’s not like pulling the rug from under a middle class lifestyle or where people are on the cusp of success.

> Right people can’t begin to imagine why sanctions against Russia don’t work.

Because they are mostly token sanctions, to raise awareness - "you're doing something which we don't agree with". Some sanctions are also more targeted - like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act, which is more troublesome for it's targets, at least judging by their reaction.

There are significant technology and financial sanctions too... but it’s like applying them to Yemen and thinking “that’ll hurt’em” or whatever, except worse because Russia has technical ability and they trade with China, etc. but like Yemen their people are used to austere circumstances.

Not exactly surprising to people familiar with the output of the Russian foreign ministry, unfortunately.

No doubt there are some sour grapes in that article. However, as an American, I feel it's our obligation to honor and respect the fact that without the Russians, we would not have had American astronauts in space for the past 9 years.

But when were they dishonored or disrespected?

> In this connection, I note another strange moment seen in not only the ‘expert’ statements, but also coming from the side of NASA officials — such as Stephanie Schierholz, who have already started making wreaths to bury the Russian Soyuz spacecraft alive.

I’m still trying to find evidence of this event ever happening.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-russia-forced-cosmonauts-...

So, I tried searching as well and haven't been able to find anything specific.

i wonder if by overtaking the USSR/Russia space program Musk did more for progress of Russian society than almost anybody else - the space program has been one of the few [left-over from USSR] pillars of Russian nationalistic "greatness", and the "great" don't need progress, changes, etc. Kicking that pillar out provides for the additional stress which at the end may lead to some movement forward, to the "problem acknowledgement" first step, a "king is naked" kind of moment. The timing is especially bad for that "greatness" - the "high" of Crimea takeover has almost gone, Russia is banned from Olympics (with sport being another "pillar") because of doping, and Putin popularity is starting to go down due to total failure to handle coronavirus and high spike in the number of "dual sided pneumonia" and cardiovascular deaths (that number of extra deaths in the last couple months is more than 10% of coronavirus cases while official coronavirus deaths are only 1% - that miracle of Russian healthcare is naturally helped by special criminal penalty for spreading of false, ie. contradicting official, coronavirus information).

I think history has its sense of irony - Musk started building his rockets as result of Russian refusal to sell rockets (i think it was about decommissioned ICBMs) to him 20 years ago. In alternative Universe by selling to him Russia would have probably slowed down SpaceX may be by 10 years or may be SpaceX wouldn't have even survived in such a case.

The focus is wavering and it is hard to make sense of much that is being said beyond: Soyuz kept bringing cosmonauts into space for 9 years - true - and SpaceX / the US would do well not to bury them just yet or disparage the accomplishments of the Soyuz program. Fair points and all that, but the tone in this is strangely personal and even a bit whiny somehow. Just not what one would expect from an official communication at that level of responsibility. Then again, if you look at Musk's tweets some days, it can be quite a strange experience. Fun times in the space industry.

> By the way, under the conditions of pandemics, limited staff managed to retain continuous work, and it became clear at once, who can continue to work remotely and who is unnecessary.

hahahahahahhaha say what you want, but I love the unfiltered nature of Russian culture.

I guess I understand the... aggressive tone of the piece given the amount of flag waving in the recent Crew Dragon launch. But, just speaking as an American with a little interest in space, I have a lot of respect for the Soyuz program.

Rogozin has nothing to do with Soyuz program’s success. He has a lot to do with it not evolving

Looks like it was ghostwritten. Completely differs from Rogozin's speech and flow of thoughts. Not so aggressive and rather peaceful. Also, this is an original article, in English. Strange for the official website where Russian is the main language and everything translated to English.

Anyway, Rogozin bad manager with huge salary overexploiting Soviet tech, including lots of which created by Ukrainians at Yuzhmash and Yuzhnoye Design Office. Paying 500-700$/month to a professional engineer(based on region, mec. eng, electrical engineering, programmers) is outrageous.

To be fair though you should count reusables as a different class of rocket which SpaceX has the lead if we're counting successful launches. Does Soyuz recycle any parts of launched rockets?

I think, this one was already posted here some time ago: https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/in-russias-spac... Basically poor people recycle rocket parts as building material for their needs.

> the cost of our launches is substantially lower

Cost for a seat on Soyuz is $90MM, cost for a seat on Dragon is $55MM. These are the market rates, not the true cost. In that whole paragraph he's basically saying that the true cost of the seat on the Soyuz is still cheaper than the true cost of the seat on the Dragon. Is there any data to substantiate that? I suppose we'll see in the coming months and years if they actually reduce their asking price.

> Equally strange is the statement that 'for the first time a private company created a crewed spacecraft'. And what about Boeing and Lockheed Martin? Aren't they still private or have they been nationalized? SpaceX is no less a private company than Boeing is with the ties to the Pentagon being no weaker,

ULA is a private rocket company, yes, and successful, but they don't yet have a successful crewed spacecraft.

The principal difference is the NASA involvement and its forms. For Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Shuttle NASA designed, managed and ordered spacecrafts. For Crew Dragon, NASA buys launches - with a lot of say in how the spacecraft should be built and behaved, but still not on the level of project initiator, as it happened before.

SpaceX is a bigger author of its manned spacecraft than any private company ever was.

> The new American spacecraft are more than double the weight of a Soyuz while offering only one additional seat.

Is this true? The launch mass of a Soyuz capsule is about 7000kg and the SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-1 launch mass was about 12000kg so not "more than double" however Demo-1 didn't include astronauts. The Crew Dragon can theoretically carry several tonnes of cargo to the ISS in addition to 4 astronauts.

I don't know if that is true, but why does the weight of the rocket matter? A reusable rocket will be heavier as it has to be built to carry extra fuel for re-entry. I would still want a reusable Space X rocket even if it is heavier

The idea here, I think, is that Dragon requires a heavier rocket - Falcon-9 - that the Soyuz does. Soyuz flies on a rocket with payload around 7500 kg, while Dragon flies on a rocket with payload, according to Wikipedia, "15600 kg when landing". So it's either a heavier spacecraft or an under-use of a rocket.

Not that such use would be particularly bad - from a point of view of standartization of launchers, for example, or taking into account that F-9 has a reuseable first stage, it makes more sense. However by payload mass the Soyuz looks more optimal.

Also, it was originally designed to carry 7 astronauts -- but NASA wanted a different seat position for stress reduction.

(I'm kind of glad that it doesn't carry 7, the more people that are on a flight, the more casualties you get if there is a failure).

SpaceX is still advertising a seven-seat capacity on their web site. The "crew dragon interior" video seems to be the NASA-endorsed four-seat configuration, but makes it pretty clear there's a whole lot of room under those four. https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/dragon/

Just be glad NASA didn't decide to go with the 5 person Apollo capsule configuration.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Sk...

Demo-1 also did not have a full life-support system, though I'm not sure that weighs 2000kg.

Russia spends a sizeable amount on space exploration, but 80% of it is stolen or defrauded by corrupt officials like Rogozin. Putin is angry about the endless string of failures that result from this, but dares not to come down too hard on the culprits for fear of losing support.

This means that Russia will fade away as a space-power, replaced by China, which is quickly catching up with the West.

All Russia can do now is bragging and brawling about its successes and drawing up an endless number of plans which will never be realized

You have to give credit to someone who is willing to put their neck on the line in such a public way. Best of luck, and I hope the competition pushes us all forward!

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20200610151434/http://en.roscosm...

As a Russian citizen, all I can say is that Rogozin is tiresome. Instead of trolling SpaceX, I'd rather see him address criticisms like this one [0], where Russian engineers talk about the sorry state of our space industry.

Although ultimately there is no mystery here.

The Soviets had a real commitment to science and technology. It was one of the few silver linings of the communist regime. Present day Russia is devoid of that commitment. You can say that lack of funding is the problem (and there is that), but even more troublesome is the apparent lack of leadership. There are no driven, fanatical figures out there trying to set up a vision for the industry. Absent drive from the top, the industry is at best in maintenance mode, trying to keep Soviet heritage pieces flying.

Case in point, Roscosmos hasn't had a space engineer for a director since the early 2000s. Rogozin is a career politician, educated as a journalist. Before Rogozin, Roscosmos was ran by an automaker named Igor Komarov who came from Avtovaz. Before Komarov, there was a string of Army Generals during the 2000s (Gen. Nikolai Ostapenko, Vladimir Popovkin, Anatoly Perminov). Car manufacturers and ICBM generals are not the people who will lobby the political leadership for a basic space program.

Oh well. Whether things will change, I dunno. I think before they do, there has to be a realization at the top that education and science are important. Right now they are playing third fiddle to guns and butter, and all we get are Rogozins whose solution to everything is to put lipstick on a pig.

[0] https://varlamov.ru/3912524.html

I thought so too, now I believe that it was sheer naivety. If anything, the realization that education matters is the last thing they come to because this is not their task. Pumping resources out while maintaining the belief of being competitive is what all this government was doing all the time. Take a look at the yearly budget, you don't need to go too far. And it was like this since I remember. Nothing changed in the colony except the managers.

"America is a very large country, and a large country should be benevolent and noble"

What? Is something lost in translation here? Interesting, Russian idiom perhaps?

I think as others have suggested the post is meant for a Russian audience (ex-pats, etc).

Otherwise it’s ridiculous knowing that Russia is double the size of the US in area and China India are four times larger in population...

Maybe a translation confusion of "big country" as in major country to "big country" as in large?

I don't like this person (and our officials in general), but I feel compelled to say, that I find the mockery of his points and all things Russian (in this thread and overall) absolutely disgusting and borderline insulting.

Sadly, it's quite typical. The most atrocious example of this mentality is (still, after so many years) US propagandist efforts to make everyone believe, that their participation in the WWII was decisive, with D-Day being the turning point, that ultimately brought the victory over Nazis. When someone dares to notice, that there were Kursk and Stalingrad in 1943 and a full-on race to Berlin quite some time before the first American troops even landed on Omaha beach, the official propaganda dismisses all evidence or smears the Russian side: like, yeah, sure, they helped a lot, no shit, but it was only possible, because Red Army was overrunning German tanks with millions of vodka-infused unarmed savages, who were machinegunned in the back by commissars, oh, and don't forget lend-lease and food, that US was providing to Russia, otherwise Hitler would have taken Leningrad in 1941...yadda-yadda

Adequate people tend to understand, that any such collective fight (conquering space is also a real fight) is collaborative, and every party plays an important role. Denigrating former allies after the fight is finished is behaving not like a human, but like an ape. It's equally disgusting to see this happen both on Russian and on American side.

I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure sizeable chunk of that is coming from russians who are very annoyed nothing good can ever happen in modern russia because of people like Rogozin.

Unfortunately, not just "nothing happens", actually happens lots of disappointing and disturbing things. I do not wish people like Rogozin achieve anything, because any achievement would be ultimately turned against us, people they genuinely consider their enemies.

Someone tends to forgot that Germany and Soviet Union started WWWII by joint attack on Poland. Soviet nazi had same color as German nazi.

They also forgot Japan and Italy existed back then.

Well, a war is a war, even when it's a cold one, and propaganda is an important weapon (disgusting as it may be).

The reason the history is so biased against the Russians in the US is because it was written by German generals. They ended up doing two things:

1. Absolving themselves of any guilt or mistake. It's all Hitler's fault. :rolleyes:

2. The Russians only won because of luck, winter, and unlimited manpower.

Franz Halder ended up getting the second highest American civilian honor for writing that history. Of course, we asked him to do it because we wanted to learn what they know so we can be better prepared against the USSR. However, we were so naive and just believed him completely. There's been a recent movement among US historians to reexamine that period and a lot of old myths we had about the USSR' role in WWII is being rejected. It's going to take a while for that to trickle out into the public. I just wish more people knew of the immense sacrifices the people of the USSR made during that war.

I read (among others) Tippelskirch's History of the WWII, and it's pretty objective. I don't think you can blame Germans for the anti-USSR propaganda, considering that it was the US, who was having their skin in the game (Cold War, started by corrupt politicians, bought by big business and financiers) after the war has ended.

This thread is a discussion of a particular article of a particular hysterical Russian official. You're trying to turn it into a clown show in a Roskosmos Twitter style: "We are Russians, god with us", "We did not start WWII in 1939", proving most of commentators here right. Glad you joined us on HN, Mr.Rogozin.

Please do not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. That is not what this site is for. It got much worse downthread, so please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23492947.

Comments here are going very far beyond discussing a "particular article", including you specifically, who is a (maybe former) Russian citizen. Replying to you feels like stepping in a pile of crap, but God asked us to be kind and wise, so I'll tolerate my disgust for a moment and tell you: Please, be ashamed of youself. And STFU.

Please don't react to a bad comment by posting a worse one. That just poisons this place even further, and the site guidelines specifically ask users not to do that, no matter how provocative another comment may be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

Using HN for flamewar like this will get you banned here, so please don't.

More generally, please stop posting nationalistic flamebait to HN. You've unfortunately done that quite a bit, and it's not ok. I understand that being an immigrant from a country is a special case, more complex than simple prejudice, but the internet doesn't handle such nuances.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am genuinely confused by the sentiment of my fellow commenters saying that this press release sounds like “satire”, “butt-hurt”, “whiny”, “sour grapes”, and “aggressive” [0][0][1][2][3].

I have the following questions for you all if you have the time to answer them.

1. What should an official press release from an leading official of a country’s national space program read like? If you have one or more examples, then please do share.

2. Should this official press release make mention of the opinions of foreign space scientists / foreign space officials and address those opinions, or should this official press release make no mention of them?

3. If one of the long-term goals of space travel is to colonize another planet in order to avoid human extinction in the case of a catastrophic world war, then is not nationalism in human space flight antithetical to that goal? Quote from Elon Musk: “If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages” [4].

4. One of the shortcomings of Soyuz seems to basically come down to some form of “it is old”. Given that this forum is Hacker News and we routinely have posts about how some specific instances of old technology have no modern viable successors with similar track records, or old ideas being rediscovered in newer technology (e.g. language features that existed in Common Lisp for decades), why does the sentiment for Soyuz so differently with with that of old technology like older programming languages or older but still used chip designs?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478044

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478215

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478087

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478013

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk...

Did you read it? Pretty ironic you are decrying nationalism when these comments from Rogozin came across as very nationalistic, effectively "you guys don't appreciate how much Russia has done for you – oh and by the way our rockets are still better than yours even though they are clearly not". There were also a lot of things that I found pretty petulant in tone. This one stood out to me:

> America is a very large country, and a large country should be benevolent and noble. However, some of my colleagues (not me, of course — I have no illusions about the partners after working as Russia’s representative to NATO) did not receive any words of gratitude or professional noble response, although they could fully count on that.

If that's not the kind of comment that discourages collaboration, I don't know what is. I mean it doesn't even make sense – what does a country's size have to do with "being noble"?

I read it. Here is one quote

Stephanie Schierholz is Lead Spokesperson, Public Affairs Specialist for Human Spaceflight for NASA. I am trying to find evidence for this Soyuz wreath, or if it was a different event that was misunderstood.

I would have expected a sportsman-like congratulation to the NASA and SpaceX, maybe followed by some intelligent and good-mannered trolling.

Something along the lines of Apple's "Welcome IBM. Seriously" ads.

This boring and aggressive piece of Cold War rhetoric definitely fits into the recent trend of worsening international relationships (of course the current US administration has its own part in this). But it's still extremely disappointing, no matter which side.

He did so in a different press release / tweet here: http://en.roscosmos.ru/21497/ and https://www.twitter.com/Rogozin/status/1267101204674478080 . Full quote below:

> Dear @JimBridenstine , it's safe to congratulate you at this point with a successful launch and docking. Bravo! I know how anxious you were for this major event to become a success. I wish @NASA team to successfully finish up reconstructing its national space transportation system

Another member of Roscosmos, Sergei Krikalev, also congratulated the Crew Dragon mission here http://en.roscosmos.ru/21495/ along with a YouTube video https://youtu.be/gu6r46gJ2g0. Full quote below:

> I would like to greet our American colleagues – this launch marks the beginning of another test cycle of the crewed spacecraft. The vehicle has already flown uncrewed – but this is a very important and crucial moment with people flying aboard the new spacecraft, and a new stage in crewed flights program begins – including world crewed flights program and International Space Station program where the vehicle went to. This means new opportunities, new reserves – and I am sure that the success of the mission will provide us with additional opportunities that will benefit the whole international program.

Krikalev is a legend of course, I wouldn't have expected anything but sportsmanship of him :)

I cannot see how you'd be confused, read the article and it seems very clear that the tone is negative, but still I'll bite.

1) Congratulate your fellow scientists for their achievement.

2) It can mention opinions from other scientists, but again, the tone should be at least a little bit less "us vs them".

3) Absolutely, which is why this article is so out of place, the author does even try to give a thumbs up to SpaceX for their work and just rambles about USA/NATO vs Russia.

4) Fair point, but no new developments and improvements mean that the price stays high. Reusable rockets mean that costs will go down and will become more accessible.

I read the article. I associate the negative tone with a defensiveness that comes from feeling as if one is under attack, which I would attribute to lingering Cold War rhetoric repurposed for modern-day politics.

1) I posted links to the congratulatory tweets and press releases here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23479424 . For whatever reason, this press release was chosen to be submitted instead.

2) I posted what seemed to the response to an attack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23479344 . I have not found evidence of the attack after I spent some time searching, so I do not know what event is being referenced.

Didn't anyone else notice that Elon Musk never met with President Donald J. Trump at the launch site.

Oh no? Took about 20 seconds to find this:

https://nypost.com/2020/05/30/elon-musks-historic-spacex-mis...

This sounds really whiney... almost like Trump drafted it for him.

I hope they fire fat bastard. Crap, he lost so many leads , during Stalin rule he would be executed for being traitor and spy.

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