That's easy to say from our position, but I'd bet that the person responsible had a pretty good idea what would happen if they reported it. At my current machi

That's easy to say from our position, but I'd bet that the person responsible had a pretty good idea what would happen if they reported it. At my current machine shop, I'd have a half dozen people documenting what happened, helping to design, implement, and rush out the repaired part, adjusting customer expectations, and making sure that the process that allowed me to make the mistake is fixed so that others repeat it. In my previous job, it depended on the day. Sometimes you'd get called into the boss' office and cussed at for a while with no consequences, sometimes you'd get something capricious like confiscating the offenders' drill bits and requiring check-out for each hole from the foreman's office for a week. (It only lasted 3 days, but that literally happened.) Sometimes the boss was having a really bad day with customers or vendors he couldn't punish, and you could have a half dozen guys bodging a repair out of the boss' view and keeping him distracted. Or fired on the spot, if it didn't work. I lasted 5 years and 37 hires and fires at that 20-man shop, should have left so much sooner. The official story is: > It is a technological error by a specialist. It was done by a human hand -- there are traces of a drill sliding along the surface. - http://tass.com/science/1019791 http://tass.com/science/1019791 Drills should not be sliding along the surface of a part. You locate the hole by marking with calipers from a known location and hit the intersection with a punch. Especially in curvy aluminum aerospace work. And there's certainly little opportunity for anyone to go get some glue, install it, wait for it to cure, and paint/cover it up without inspection. I am surprised, though, that they didn't just weld in some filler and grind it smooth. I suspect that NASA and some of their suppliers are nominally more like the former but practically there's still some risk to admitting error, and that Roscosmos/Energia is closer to the latter.