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Comment by adwn | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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