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whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union, and it doesnt happen to China, but its happened twice to the US now. Why is the US giving Boeing

whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union, and it doesnt happen to China, but its happened twice to the US now. Why is the US giving Boeing a free pass for this? it frankly makes the US look pathetic. News stations quit covering it once the cat was out of the bag that this isnt a "routine evaluation" and the crew is actually just stranded. 23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand?

practicemaths 2y ago
Maybe China and Russia are less risk averse? Americans hate dead astronauts.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  The US has far more deaths per flight than any other nation. There have been 19 astronauts that have died during spaceflight. [1] 14 of them have been American, with the US and USSR/Russia having a comparable number of total launches. The USSR/Russia's most recent fatality was in 1971. NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
  - practicemaths 2y ago
    When is the last time that China or Russia tried testing an entirely new launch vehicle? It is my understanding, aside from upgrades, they have not really built anything new. Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has one with 6-100 deaths. And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960. I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts here.
  - jerf 2y ago
    "NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing" This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to maximum, the only acceptable solution is to do what was done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is something that could fail in a new and unknown way, possibly bigger than before. This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of their inertia and inability to change course. When the penalty for slightly more failure than before (in anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight promotion, you converge on having an organization full of people where this is the only path forward, no matter how much acknowledgement there is that the current situation is broken by every last person involved. To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is creating a culture where people have permission to fail at least a little before being evicted from it. Your biggest successes will always involve some failures on the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of successes will go with it. It's not that you literally want to break things or that managers should necessarily create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing your company by making it the absolute number one priority above all else.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      > This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. Not really, because commercial air travel had problems early on, and the FAA approach was to investigate, determine root causes, and make changes to eliminate or reduce the probability of them happening again. Assigning blame or scapegoating was not part of their process (not that it didn't happen in the media). And now commercial air travel is very safe.
      - theluketaylor 2y ago
  - philwelch 2y ago
    The only reason the US had so many more fatalities is because the Shuttle carried a larger crew in the first place.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  China, at least Modern China is extremely risk averse. Basically if anything bad happens (not necessarily a death) the whole team would go through a lengthy close-looping quality management process. It is only after the success of SpaceX that things seem to loosen up a bit.
tjpnz 2y ago
>23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand? How sure are you about there being no issues or delays?
pavel_lishin 2y ago
> 23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues To be fair, that we know of. It's entirely possible that their re-entry vehicles also had issues that they decided were an acceptable risk, and were proven correct - without publicizing them.
BobbyJo 2y ago
The U.S. has launched more manned missions in the last three years than China has in the last 20. China has literally dropped rockets on Chinese villages. The Soviet Union treated its astronauts as disposable, and covered up many of their failed missions. What do you consider a free pass for Boeing btw?
- computerex 2y ago
  Say what you will, Russia still has the most reliable launch vehicle that's ever existed.
  - plasticchris 2y ago
    Proton? It has about 89 percent success, nowhere close to Falcon 9’s 99 percent success rate.
    - computerex 2y ago
      No, Soyuz. And Soyuz has like 4x-5x number of launches of Falcon 9 so direct comparisons like yours don't work. Soyuz is the most reliable launch vehicle and spacecraft that's ever existed.
      - Workaccount2 2y ago
        Note that your original comment made no acknowledgement of the number of launches by each country. But now when it suites you, it's all important.
        computerex 2y ago
        What? I was responding to the person saying falcon 9 is the most reliable vehicle we have. I was merely pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+ launches over Falcon 9 and that there is no comparison.
        2y ago
cooper_ganglia 2y ago
I found Xi Jinping’s HN account!
- wumeow 2y ago
  He’s got a lot of them here.
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
> whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union Tell that to Vladimir Komarov who launched on Soyuz 1 despite knowing it was a death sentence because if he refused then his close friend (Yuri Gagarin) would have to fly in his stead. The rocket had several hundred structural problems and they knew it would fail but they launched anyways. So he died screaming while he burned to death on reentry and he broadcasted it in the clear so that everyone could listen. And they insisted that his remains be shown in an open casket so that leadership would have to look at what they did. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/c... Or the three backup crew members who flew Soyuz 11 and died of asphyxiation despite the fact that it was a known issue that the cabin pressure valves that led to their deaths did not reliably close automatically. Manually closing them was not part of their reentry flight plan and the only thing they got was a warning from an original crew member to do so because it wasn't safe and they wouldn't add it to the flight plan.
- bparsons 2y ago
  Two space shuttles burned up...
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be individually safely mitigated (but not all together) more than a blatant failure on any one person or group in the org's part. Additionally space shuttles had experienced conditions extremely similar to Columbia's time and again without any major damage or risk to crew. It still was a failure but it was a much more complex and subtle form of failure than the Challenger disaster. But neither of those remotely compares to Soyuz 1 or Soyuz 11. The failure in Soyuz 11 had been seen time and again during trainings and testing but was waived away and the only reason it didn't occur earlier was because of pilots unofficially taking steps to mitigate the issue outside of the flight plan that then weren't performed on Soyuz 11. And the failure in Soyuz 1 was expected from before launch. It wasn't a statistical probability that the team made a risky gamble on (like Challenger) but was a definite death sentence. Soyuz 1 is equivalent to if you had the Challenger failure but on several hundred different parts of the rocket instead of on just one. Either way the point of my original comment was to dissuade the notion that the USSR didn't have embarrassing crewed failures in space flight, not to try and pick sides on who was worse.
big-green-man 2y ago
Didn't happen in the Soviet Union, nope sure didn't. they just let the cosmonauts die. https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/china-tianlong-3-rocket-crash-accidental-launch-space-pioneer-gongyi https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/chin... I agree it makes the US look pathetic.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
It was bad behind the iron curtain, so bad, that in ukraine half a million man are willing to fight and die to not go back behind one. The propaganda posters hanging on the wall, had nothing to do with the reality behind it.
namaria 2y ago
You're right, China and the Soviet Union would never allow a public discussion of technical problems in their governmental programs.

practicemaths 2y ago

Maybe China and Russia are less risk averse? Americans hate dead astronauts.

somenameforme 2y ago
The US has far more deaths per flight than any other nation. There have been 19 astronauts that have died during spaceflight. [1] 14 of them have been American, with the US and USSR/Russia having a comparable number of total launches. The USSR/Russia's most recent fatality was in 1971. NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing which has left 14 astronauts dead, and now these astronauts stranded. There just seems to be a extreme disconnect between the actual engineering staff and the managerial layer, probably exasperated by the fact that political appointees head the organization. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...
- practicemaths 2y ago
  When is the last time that China or Russia tried testing an entirely new launch vehicle? It is my understanding, aside from upgrades, they have not really built anything new. Edit: also looking at your list of accidents, China has one with 6-100 deaths. And USSR has 120 deaths in 1960. I think you need to look at deaths beyond just Astronauts here.
- jerf 2y ago
  "NASA is paradoxical, because in terms of how they are perceived they're seen as this ultra risk averse safety-first organization, but in terms of actual behavior - they keep doing the exact same thing" This paradox is easily resolved. As risk aversion goes to maximum, the only acceptable solution is to do what was done before. Anything we deviate from doing before is something that could fail in a new and unknown way, possibly bigger than before. This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. It is one of the major drivers of their inertia and inability to change course. When the penalty for slightly more failure than before (in anything except money spend, that's OK as long as it's done by high level people) is expulsion and scapegoating and the reward for doing slightly better is a pat on the back and a denied request for a salary upgrade/slight promotion, you converge on having an organization full of people where this is the only path forward, no matter how much acknowledgement there is that the current situation is broken by every last person involved. To take a really big diversion, one of the deeper aspects of the "move fast and break things" philosophy isn't just about directly moving fast and breaking things; it is creating a culture where people have permission to fail at least a little before being evicted from it. Your biggest successes will always involve some failures on the way, so if you rigorously eliminate all failure from your organization, all but the smallest, most basic of successes will go with it. It's not that you literally want to break things or that managers should necessarily create a "broken things" metric and try to keep it in some band above zero but below catastrophe, it's about making avoiding breakage not calcifying and paralyzing your company by making it the absolute number one priority above all else.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    > This isn't a NASA thing, this is one of the basics of large bureaucracies. Not really, because commercial air travel had problems early on, and the FAA approach was to investigate, determine root causes, and make changes to eliminate or reduce the probability of them happening again. Assigning blame or scapegoating was not part of their process (not that it didn't happen in the media). And now commercial air travel is very safe.
    - theluketaylor 2y ago
- philwelch 2y ago
  The only reason the US had so many more fatalities is because the Shuttle carried a larger crew in the first place.
markus_zhang 2y ago
China, at least Modern China is extremely risk averse. Basically if anything bad happens (not necessarily a death) the whole team would go through a lengthy close-looping quality management process. It is only after the success of SpaceX that things seem to loosen up a bit.

tjpnz 2y ago

>23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues or delays. Maybe we should ask the China Manned Space Agency for a hand? How sure are you about there being no issues or delays?

pavel_lishin 2y ago

> 23 Taikonauts in China made it to and from the Tiangong space station in the Shenzhou xx series of rockets with no issues To be fair, that we know of. It's entirely possible that their re-entry vehicles also had issues that they decided were an acceptable risk, and were proven correct - without publicizing them.

BobbyJo 2y ago

The U.S. has launched more manned missions in the last three years than China has in the last 20. China has literally dropped rockets on Chinese villages. The Soviet Union treated its astronauts as disposable, and covered up many of their failed missions. What do you consider a free pass for Boeing btw?

computerex 2y ago
Say what you will, Russia still has the most reliable launch vehicle that's ever existed.
- plasticchris 2y ago
  Proton? It has about 89 percent success, nowhere close to Falcon 9’s 99 percent success rate.
  - computerex 2y ago
    No, Soyuz. And Soyuz has like 4x-5x number of launches of Falcon 9 so direct comparisons like yours don't work. Soyuz is the most reliable launch vehicle and spacecraft that's ever existed.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      Note that your original comment made no acknowledgement of the number of launches by each country. But now when it suites you, it's all important.
      - computerex 2y ago
        What? I was responding to the person saying falcon 9 is the most reliable vehicle we have. I was merely pointing out that soyuz has like 1500+ launches over Falcon 9 and that there is no comparison.
        2y ago

cooper_ganglia 2y ago

I found Xi Jinping’s HN account!

wumeow 2y ago
He’s got a lot of them here.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago

> whats wild is this problem never happened to the Soviet Union Tell that to Vladimir Komarov who launched on Soyuz 1 despite knowing it was a death sentence because if he refused then his close friend (Yuri Gagarin) would have to fly in his stead. The rocket had several hundred structural problems and they knew it would fail but they launched anyways. So he died screaming while he burned to death on reentry and he broadcasted it in the clear so that everyone could listen. And they insisted that his remains be shown in an open casket so that leadership would have to look at what they did. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/c... Or the three backup crew members who flew Soyuz 11 and died of asphyxiation despite the fact that it was a known issue that the cabin pressure valves that led to their deaths did not reliably close automatically. Manually closing them was not part of their reentry flight plan and the only thing they got was a warning from an original crew member to do so because it wasn't safe and they wouldn't add it to the flight plan.

bparsons 2y ago
Two space shuttles burned up...
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  Challenger is 100% on NASA but the Columbia disaster was a perfect storm of small mistakes that could be individually safely mitigated (but not all together) more than a blatant failure on any one person or group in the org's part. Additionally space shuttles had experienced conditions extremely similar to Columbia's time and again without any major damage or risk to crew. It still was a failure but it was a much more complex and subtle form of failure than the Challenger disaster. But neither of those remotely compares to Soyuz 1 or Soyuz 11. The failure in Soyuz 11 had been seen time and again during trainings and testing but was waived away and the only reason it didn't occur earlier was because of pilots unofficially taking steps to mitigate the issue outside of the flight plan that then weren't performed on Soyuz 11. And the failure in Soyuz 1 was expected from before launch. It wasn't a statistical probability that the team made a risky gamble on (like Challenger) but was a definite death sentence. Soyuz 1 is equivalent to if you had the Challenger failure but on several hundred different parts of the rocket instead of on just one. Either way the point of my original comment was to dissuade the notion that the USSR didn't have embarrassing crewed failures in space flight, not to try and pick sides on who was worse.

big-green-man 2y ago

Didn't happen in the Soviet Union, nope sure didn't. they just let the cosmonauts die. https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/china-tianlong-3-rocket-crash-accidental-launch-space-pioneer-gongyi https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/chin... I agree it makes the US look pathetic.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

It was bad behind the iron curtain, so bad, that in ukraine half a million man are willing to fight and die to not go back behind one. The propaganda posters hanging on the wall, had nothing to do with the reality behind it.

namaria 2y ago

You're right, China and the Soviet Union would never allow a public discussion of technical problems in their governmental programs.