Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

rasz

First we had holes drilled in Russian module

then we had a fire in same Russian module

then Russian supply ship rammed ISS

and now this. Someone in Russia is really trying hard.

View on HN

You even missed one. The Russian supply ship also caused a second uncontrolled spin of the ISS after being berthed for a while.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/russia-spun-space-station-agai...

Something is definitely off nominal in the Russian space agency.

Russian space competency was based on USSR. As time goes on, old bisons are passing out and young competent people are not going to work for a fraction of PHP developer salary. Space is not a joke, I guess.

That's not a malicious intent, that's incompetency. Not like it matters in the end.

To make it more specific for westerners, there was some discussion of published industry salary data in 2019, and the average salary for engineers working in the Russian space manufacturing companies was something like 60000 RUB/month (depending on the region - those in Moscow had a higher coefficient, but the regional manufacturing cities had lower) which comes out to approximately 10k USD / year.

They seem to try to tell something to the world, but I don't know how to interpret it.

"If we can't have a seat at the space table, we are willing to destroy the table"

Sounds like their message. Next thing Russia will do is put some ransomeware up there and claim they don't know who did it.

Exactly. Putin on nuclear options:

“Certainly, it would be a global disaster for humanity; a disaster for the entire world,” Putin said, in an interview for a Russian documentary “The World Order 2018,” adding that “as a citizen of Russia and the head of the Russian state I must ask myself: Why would we want a world without Russia?”

https://www.rt.com/news/420715-putin-world-russia-nuclear/

Don't think the Russians really care about the ISS for now its just a stop gap until the Chinese space station is more developed. At least relationships between Russia and China is warm and the leaders respect each other. Don't think Russia and EU really see eye to eye and EU leaders are really disrespectful in their diplomacy(if you can call what the west does diplomacy). Super weird because the EU and US aren't really talking from a position of strength in 2021 as Milley said we are now in a period where there are 3 great powers the US, China and Russia.

> leaders respect each other

I don't think they respect each other at all. China sees Russia as a large province that they will eventually absorb.

The only reason why Russia is going towards China is because China doesn't care that its a dictatorship.

Russia has every strategic reason in the world to not go in the direction of China.

The ISS would have fallen out a window if it wasn't in orbit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com