A cura di @MostroDeiBiscotti

Dopo la perdita di una Progress avvenuta nella giornata di ieri, salgono a quindici i lanci falliti dall’agenzia spaziale russa dal 2011. Esiste un problema di affidabilità dei vettori russi? Secondo un articolo di The Planetary Society, è una questione di fondi e di demografia.

“The Russian space sector is short of funding, and may be having difficulties maintaining its quality control standards,” said John Logsdon, a Planetary Society board member and professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Additionally, Russia’s workforce is shrinking. Since the 1990s, the country’s population has steadily declined, despite an influx of more than 9 million immigrants. […]

“The effect of that is that they have a skills mismatch in certain industrial sectors, that appears to include the launch industry,” he told me. “The fact that we’ve seen several instances of Russian rockets not working as designed the past few years seems to support that thesis.”