Another Russian launch failure

[Dr Mordrid]

This is getting nuts -

Sea Launch is a joint venture now owned 95% by Russia's Energia and ~5% by Boeing. They launch geostationary satellites from a converted drilling platform near the equator after being towed from Long Beach, California (gives the rocket an added bit of energy from Earth's rotation.) They use the Zenit launcher.

Because of the troubles with the Proton launcher since 2010 (Fobos-Grunt etc.) Russia was going to transfer some flights to Zenit. That may have to be rethought as Zenit suffered a catastrophic failure today, veering south right after launch instead of east. This forced activation of its flight termination system at T+25 seconds. It crashed into the Pacific south of the platform.

Oops 1

This also puts the coming Russian Angara launcher program at risk because its RD-191 engine is based on the Zenits RD-171, and Angara's Briz-KM upper stage is an evolution of the troublesome Proton Briz-M upper stage.

Oops 2

Needless to say, there is a circular firing squad forming over this one. Also, there is a delayed Proton flight later this month.

Another failure and Russia may have to self-insure its launchers

[Jammrock]

You'd think that after 60+ years of rocket building people would be better at this, and not worse.

Kind of makes you feel safer that the US seems to be the only country with consistent ballistic missile launch capabilities. Depending on how you feel about the US I guess...

[KRSESQ]

IIRC, ballistic missiles are usually single-or-two-stage solid fuel rockets. Much simpler technology. Still, you'd think after all these years, they'd have this 'rockets' stuff down to a science.

[Dr Mordrid]

Modern ICBM / SLBM's etc. are solids because they can be immediately launched and stored for long periods with little maintenance. Not so liquids.

The 1950's R7 liquid ICBM evolved into Soyuz with which there is 60 years of evolution, changing a little at a time for mainly LEO and smaller BEO payloads.

One problem is that with the aging of their engineers, and the younger ones going overseas to ESA, US companies, NASA, and other countries for mbetter opportunities their larger projects have suffered. There are also huge quality control and software issues, plus Russian computers & other hardware is not as radiation hardened as Western systems. This is a big part of the problem they have with Mars missions. Not so much an issue in LEO where Soyuz flies. And just think - before the fall of the USSR Zenit was planned to replace Soyuz launcher.

This also puts Angara launcher development under pressure because of its Zenit heritage and the other issues.

The Register's 2nd headline was telling -

"Elon Musk smiles smugly, strokes cat."

[Dr Mordrid]

Russian reports say they suspect the "бортового источника мощности" (onboard power system (source?))

(Russian): http://ria.ru/science/20130204/921251559.html