news

Soyuz's design is reliable, but there's been a lot of QA issues in the past decade with new-build vehicles. It's frankly systemic within Roscosmos. The Salyut-derived space station modules have also have major QA issues. For example in 2021 there was a new ISS laboratory module called Nauka which malfunctioned after docking to the ISS. The attitude control thrusters used for docking somehow turned on after docking, and kept firing until it was out of fuel. It sent the whole ISS into a slow tumble. for almost an hour until the station could be brought back under control.

Going back to Soyuz, there was the hole in in the orbital module of crewed Soyuz MS-09 that happened during construction. Fortunately real-world space doesn't work like movie-space. No-one is going to be sucked out into space through that hole. ISS's has plenty of air reserves to counteract it. And that orbital module is jettison before reentering atmosphere, so it was never a safety issue for the returning crew. But the fact that it happened at all, that it wasn't caught during inspections, and that Roscosmos tried to blame the American astronaut that rode on it for the problem with very misogynist language are all troubling.

There was a booster separation failure of crewed Soyuz flight MS-10 due to mishandling of a Soyuz-2 side booster by ground technicians. Fortunately Soyuz has an excellent emergency-abort capability. Both the Russian cosmonaut and American astronaut on board safely landed on Earth after an emergency separation from the tumbling rocket.

Crewed Soyuz flight MS-22 had a coolant leak (there's a great animated GIF in that link of it) of the same type that happened to uncrewed cargo flight Progress 82, and Roscosmos had to launch MS-23 uncrewed as a replacement to bring the MS-22 crew home safely. Progress is basically a disposable Soyuz modified for delivering cargo up. It's also the way ISS crew disposes of trash. They just swap cargo for trash over the course of its stay until there's no more cargo to unload. Then it undocks and burns up in the atmosphere. Progress uses the same type of docking port and autonomous flight and docking system that Soyuz does.

I don't mean to sound like I'm disrespecting USSR spaceflight history. I really do have the utmost respect for what they accomplished. First satellite, first animal flight, first crew flight, first spacewalk, first space station, first multiple-segment space station, first (and only!) landings on Venus of all hellish places, the list of USSR space accomplishments is incredible. I celebrate Yuri's Night every year! My beef is just with the underfunding and mismanagement of Roscosmos which directly impacts QA on new builds. Both are issues we can lay squarely at the feet of post-USSR-fall liberalism.

I won't give any credit to King Shithead of the Shithead Kingdom who owns SpaceX, but I will give the engineers and technicians there, the ones who do the real work, credit for their QA approach. Since they re-use as much hardware as possible flight-to-flight, they have what is probably the most extensive and thorough QA process in the whole aerospace industry. Nothing goes up without ridiculously detailed inspections. The worst thing that happened on any Crew Dragon flight is that one of the toilets on ~~Polaris Dawn~~ Inspiration4 (I remembered the wrong mission, Polaris Dawn was this year's private flight with the spacewalk, it went properly, it was the prior Inspiration4 mission that had the primary toilet issue) didn't work properly, so they had to use one of the backups for the rest of the flight. Aside from that there's never been any problems.

I uh may be a bit of a space nut. Didn't intend for this comment to be so long!