OT- China in Space

I watched my dad come home day after day heading for the drink cabinet. One of his 'tasks' was to maintain the radar and radio linkage as the early soviet pioneers flew overhead. We - WE the USA - data logged everything we could gather - not much could be kept away - not exotic covert times in space...

Those tapes were used by scientists to better understand what radiation did to an unprotected body and many other things. Some didn't last long and didn't go quiet into the night.

Martin

Remember the entire launch program party and Sky City blew up! That set them back some time! That was a missile loaded with Cosmonaughts.

Martin

"Spehro Pefhany" >

In all the movies I've seen they speak with American accents and pretend to be friendly, but they're really planning something evil to do with you !

Dean. ( Oh, and they wear really bad rubber suits )

I'm finding various numbers for total Soyuz launches (apparently, there's some disagreement over which platforms are considered "Soyuz"), but the highest figure I've found is < 1800.

I can see where the total number of launches could be used to get an idea of the platform's reliability, but in that case you should count the total number of failures, not just the ones that result in cosmonaut fatalities. In other words, either use human casualties per manned launch or total number of failures per total number of launches, but NOT human casualties per total (manned + unmanned) launches. Using the third comparison would mean that a platform that is never manned would have a 100% success rate, even if every single launch exploded.

I'll see if I can dig up some numbers tonight.

BTW, if we start counting observer / ground crew casualties, I don't think the Soviet record looks so good.

R, Tom Q.

Thus the point of my original question. Of course, there have been many inquiries into the ex-USSR space program since the fall of the evil empire, and we haven't turned up much of anything.

No it wasn't. That was the N-1 pad explosion (their version of the Saturn). It did kill several of their technicians and a few of their top designers who were examining an anomaly during fueling of the rocket. But it didn't even have a crew capsule. This was the second test N-1 to fail on the pad, the first didn't kill anyone. The failure of the N-1 effectively ended their manned Moon landing program. They didn't build a rocket that big again until the Energia vehicle used to launch Buran (their version of the Shuttle). Energia was a complete success, but proved too costly, and no more have been built.

Gary

AFAIK that's government funding. The profits they make on commercial launches isn't included in the $1.5 billion a year figure.

Gary

The Russians made attempts to resuscitate in such situations, The US did not

Starbucks. Or Mickey Dees.

-Carl

Well, it was harding finding specific numbers than I expected. Different sites categorize launch vehicles by different criteria and many didn't indicate how current their data are.

I think the following numbers are in the ballpark.

From

Vehicle Successes Tries Realzd Rate Soyuz Variants

ALL SOYUZ 809 831 .97

These numbers are very close to the ones I found at:

Also found a couple of sites with launch / launch vehicle databases:

This one has a search form with several selectable criteria:

On Sat, 18 Oct 2003 02:18:19 GMT, Carl Byrns pixelated:

No, those are their currencies. McBonics will be the language.

------------------------------------------------------------- give me The Luxuries Of Life *

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Both of those things are *everywhere*...

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I remember the good old days when it was Radio Shack and 7/11 that were trying to take over the world.