What a generous universe to give us a second gentle reminder in such short time that end-to-end software testing is important.
It's not that their technology isn't cutting edge or valid. They simply aren't accountable to the same rigor that NASA imposes in the US. They're playing by different rules and there's no mutual recourse for misconduct or malice. National pride and reputation is all well and good, but the ISS mission deserves better.
"Oops, we killed the ISS, guess we'll do better next time" isn't something that should be so frequent a possibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
In fairness, the US has flown around 2.5x more people into space, but the Soyuz also ferried a whole lot of them up and down.
That’s skewed though because the US craft had more people on board. The two shuttle accidents killed 14 astronauts while the two Soyuz accidents killed 4.
In terms of number of fatal incidents they are even if you discount the X-15, or pretty close if you don’t.
Although you do have to wonder how the Buran would have fared if it has survived the Soviet collapse.
Does Russian have recourse for misconduct or malice from NASA? If not then I think it's a situation where both parties have skin in the game and are trying their best. Mistakes happen, and it would be counterproductive to assume malice without evidence.
If you want to make your point, I'd at least expect some kind of statistical analysis of accident frequency vs number of contributions, and then doing an analysis if there is a significant deviation in the distribution.
My null hypothesis is that the frequency of mistakes/accidents is roughly proportional to the number of modules contributed by each nation.
Space is hard, incredibly hard. We can only guess how hard space is. And all we can do, as spacefarers, is to be better. That's the same process we used to make flight safer, and it will work with space.