Do you wish we had a Space Shuttle now?

MOSCOW - The list of recent Russia space mission duds has grown troubling long.
Last week, the Soyuz U rocket, carrying the unmanned Progress cargo load to the International Space Station (ISS), launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazhakstan, and was expected to decouple nine minutes later. But after experiencing propulsion problems, the Progress ended up tumbling to earth in the Altai Republic, Siberia, after the third stage of its rocket carrier failed.
Last December, Russia was forced to crash three satellites into the Pacific Ocean worth a total of $140 million that were crucial to its GLONASS navigation system, a rival to the American-made GPS. That failed mission led to the reprimand of the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Anatoly Perminov, who promised to get the Glonass devices into orbit. But soon after, he quit, and the orbit is still incomplete.
In February, there was a launch failure of the rocket carrying the earth-mapping satellite Geo IK-2. Due to booster rocket problems, it was put into the wrong orbit for three months before burning out in the upper reaches of the earth’s atmosphere.
After this $134 million failure, the deputy head of Roscosmos was reprimanded.
And early this month, a multi-million dollar communications satellite was placed outside its intended orbit, due to a motor failure, prompting Russia to ground its chief Proton-M rocket for commercial and military launches.
Too few rocket specialists
This all adds up to a half-billion dollars worth of errors for the Russian space programme this year alone. After the most recent mishap, Roscosmos has not yet said whether it would suspend a manned mission to the space station planned for September, but the Soyuz rocket is the only one that can carry people and supplies to the ISS. Progress had on board three tons of supplies, food and water, medical instruments and spare parts for the American segment of the station.
The American space shuttle completed its last flight, and NASA had struck a $750 million deal with the Russian space agency to supply the ISS using the Soyuz and the Progress. Roscosmos insists the ISS will not be affected as there are adequate supplies of food and water on the station for several months.
Although it has set up an investigation committee, it has long been known that the Russian space program needs substantial change. “The crisis in the department is not new, but after 15 years of stagnation, the agency got the money required to put together a decent space program,” says Igor Lisov, an expert from the industry magazine Space News. “You need to remember that we inherited a bad legacy. There are too few specialists. Now all hopes are pinned on the youth who despite it all, are coming into the department and getting ready to take over from the previous generation. But as long as they are paid peanuts, there is little hope for progress.”
Meanwhile industry expert Konstantin Kredenko said the problems stem from the faults left by the previous management. “All the failures are not with the space devices themselves, rather they are with the rocket and its components. This is not surprising. Those very rockets have not been changed for years."
And again, without the proper staff and training, not much can change. “(They) got rid of all our rocket specialists, but we are not looking for new ones. This is the problem with our system.”

Russian engineers are fighting to save the country's latest mission to Mars.

The Phobos-Grunt probe launched successfully but then failed to fire the engine to put it on the correct path to the Red Planet.

Russian space agency officials say the craft is currently stuck in an Earth orbit and that engineers have two weeks to correct the fault before the probe's batteries run out.

The project is Russia's most ambitious space venture in recent years.

It has been designed to collect rock and dust samples from Mars' moon Phobos and bring them back for study in labs on Earth.

Scientists hope the dusty debris would provide fresh insights into the origin of the 27km-wide moon, which many scientists suspect may actually be a captured asteroid.

The venture is also significant because it is carrying China's first Mars satellite. Yinghuo-1 is riding piggyback on Phobos-Grunt.

The two craft lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Zenit rocket at 00:16 local time on Wednesday (20:16 GMT Tuesday) and were dropped off in an elliptical orbit around the Earth 11 minutes later

Hawkeye we lost a billion dollar Mars probe because one set of engineers who design the rockets used the English system and the ones who program the computers to send commands to the rockets used the meter system. The result was hitting Mars not orbiting the planet.

**** happen and a failure of any space probe say nothing concerning the Russian overall abilities in space.

Russia's recent poor launch record has continued with yet another Soyuz rocket failure.

This time, a Soyuz-2 vehicle failed to put a communications satellite into orbit after lifting away from the country's Plesetsk spaceport.

Debris is said to have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere near the western Siberian town of Tobolsk.

In August, a Soyuz failure on a mission to resupply the space station led to a six-week suspension of flights.

Friday's rocket was carrying a Meridian-5 satellite, designed to provide communication between ships, planes and coastal stations on the ground, according to RIA Novosti.

It was a Soyuz-2.1b, the most modern version of the rocket that has been in service in various forms since the 1960s.

The failure is said to have occurred seven minutes into the flight. Sources being quoted by the Russian media talk of an anomaly in the rocket's third stage.

"The satellite failed to go into its orbit. A state commission will investigate the causes of the accident," the spokesman of Russia's space forces, Alexei Zolotukhin, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

August's botched launch involved a Soyuz-U. An inquiry into that incident eventually traced the problem to a blocked fuel line, again in the third stage of the vehicle. But the U and 2.1b Soyuz variants use different engines in this segment of the rocket, so no immediate parallels between the two incidents can be drawn.

Friday's failure now puts a major question mark against the next Soyuz launch, scheduled for 28 December from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This flight is intended to put in orbit six satellites for the Globalstar satellite phone company.

And it will raise concern again among the partners on the International Space Station (ISS) that there may be systemic problems in the Russian launch sector.

Following the retirement of the American space shuttle in July, the Soyuz rocket is the only means of getting astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS. August's failure saw manned flights stand down even longer than the six weeks for unmanned Soyuz rockets, and the hiatus put a severe strain on the operation of the space station.

I am expecting the Russians to kill a NASA astronaut in the near future. I hope that I am wrong. Even if not the Space Station will not be in use much longer...what a colossal waste of time and money.

It took more than $100 billion to manufacture a white elephant in near-Earth orbit called the International Space Station, a large, smelly metal can that to date has produced no science, no manufacturing, and tourism that only billionaires could afford.

Do you wish we had a Space Shuttle now?

Do you wish we had a Space Shuttle now?