While modern liberal capitalist Russia with its oligarchs and chud politicians can eat my shit and hair, a) Putin isn't personally responsible for the craft crashing, this is just "Bad thing happened, how do we blame it on Very Bad Man" which is just pathetic journalism, and b) lots of things go wrong with these kinds of missions all the time. Even the successful ones are like "Oh, awesome, our craft landed upside down, there's dust over the solar panels, and one of the legs is broken, but we otherwise have a connection? That's a big W in my book!"
I put a solid 80% of the blame on Gorbachev and Yeltsin (and the absolute blood-sucking monstrous ghouls who conducted the shock doctrine) for everything in the Russian state decaying after the disastrous fall of the USSR. Putin's far from innocent in terms of liberalization of the economy and ideally he will be put up against the wall in a people's tribunal, but he inherited it from those two dipshits and it would be silly to pin the blame for the decay of Roscosmos solely on him.
Unrelated, but also worth noting that Russian missile and rocket engines are still second-to-none, so they still have a big role to play in a spacefaring near-to-mid future.
Not sure you spent as much time reading the article as you did writing your reply.
This is ArsTechnica/Eric Berger, not "RagNewsInc©": they went into quite the amount of details and facts explaining Putin's direct contribution to Russia's space program current state of affairs.
Despite the title, it didn't read (to me) as much politically motived as you make it to be.@SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net
I know this is up your alleyway, not sure if you have any detail to add
The failure of Luna 25 cements Putin’s role as a disastrous
spaceleaderFTFY.
Russia was flying US Astronauts to the ISS for a decade. The USA has a history of failed launches. This article is just propaganda.
Yeah, how about you read the damn article? This is mentioned:
The crew vehicle served the Soviet space program through 1991 and since then has been a mainstay for the country's large space corporation, Roscosmos. The Soyuz is a hardy, generally reliable vehicle that NASA counted on for crew transport from 2011 to 2020, after the space shuttle's retirement and before SpaceX's Crew Dragon came into service.
The Soyuz spacecraft, as well as a lot of the country's other satellites, launches into orbit on the Soyuz rocket. This vehicle dates back even a bit further, to 1966. Russian engineers have modified and modernized both the spacecraft and rocket over time, but they remain essentially the same space vehicles.
There's nothing wrong with aging technology that works. However, there have been some issues of late with leaks and other problems that have raised serious questions about quality control and the ability of the Russians to manufacture these vehicles.
IOW, Russia lost a decades-long ability under the watch of Putin/his appointed cronies
Yeah, Roscosmos was a pretty normal space agency, ESA even had collaborations with them (ExoMars comes to mind). It's Putin's political decisions that have all but ended Roscosmos. I can't see them recovering from this, at least not in the near future.
Oh shit, I don't even need to look to know hexbears are getting spicy in the comments lmao
