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Comment by robbedpeter | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why Russian technology is trusted. This is the latest of several screw-ups in the last 5 years, ranging from sabotage to incompetence to bad software coming out of Russia.

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.

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Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Soviet/Russian space program has a much better track record than the US: the US accounts for 15 of 19 spaceflight fatalities, and 9 of 11 training or test fatalities (including 1 for Virgin, not NASA).

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.

> the US accounts for 15 of 19 spaceflight fatalities

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.

Surely the Soviets deserve some credit for never designing and continuing to fly something as hysterically unreliable and dangerous as the Shuttle?

Although you do have to wonder how the Buran would have fared if it has survived the Soviet collapse.

(published fatalities, the same way a jammed tunnel with thousands of cars recently flooded and the official death toll in all of China was 53.)

I hate to disappoint you, comrade, but the "lost cosmonauts" have been pretty thoroughly debunked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cosmonauts

Does the training or test fatalities include 3 for the Apollo 1 fire? If counting ground-based accidents, it seems incomplete to leave out the Soviet N-1 explosion that killed more than all the other incidents combined.

>They're playing by different rules and there's no mutual recourse for misconduct or malice.

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.

because they are co owners of the station. US can't just decide to not let Russians on it.

The same rigor as NASA, huh? The same NASA that lost an orbiter and crew because of political pressure to launch under non-optimal circumstances, and another orbiter and crew because they fell prey to normalization of deviance when it came to damage assessment?

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.

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