Junior Chubb,
For someone making the claim that the Chinese manned space programme is safer than the Russians you seem to be a little vague in your reasoning. Your post seems to be almost totally a fact free zone.
Junior Chubb, on 30 June 2012 - 08:06 PM, said:
But right now (in my maybe less educated view) I would rather be on a Chinese space flight rather than a Russian one (whether the design is Russian or Inuit ).
I doubt that you will find anyone that actually knows anything about these two programmes that would agree with you.
Rather than the vague guess work you are basing your conclusions on shall we inject some reality and fact?
Your statement about funding problems would be true if you were writing this before 2005. The Russian economy has grown strongly as a result of gas and oil since then and Roscosmos no longer has the financial problems it did 7 or 8 years ago. Roscosmos has a far larger budget than the China National Space Agency.
You seem to be extremely vague about the "crash" but I'm assuming you mean the launch failure of Progress M-12M on 24
th August 2011. This launch failure caught the attention of the media because it resulted in the loss of a supply vehicle to the ISS and used a similar launch vehicle to the manned Soyuz spacecraft.
Let's put that loss into perspective shall we? The ISS is the 4
th space station serviced by these vehicles. They entered service in 1978 and have supplied Salyut 6, Salyut 7 and Mir before the ISS. There have been more than 135 flights of this vehicle and M-12M was the only failure. That makes it more reliable than the shuttle.
Now the Soyuz, a vehicle which you wouldn't fly on, which is rather odd as it is such a good vehicle that the Chinese have based their Shenzhou on it. Soyuz had a poor start, with two fatal accidents in its first 4 years. Soyuz 1 suffered a parachute failure in 1967 and Soyuz 11 lost pressure during re-entry. The crew were not wearing pressure suits and suffocated. Soyuz has not had a fatal accident since. That is 41 years without the loss of a cosmonaut, which is remarkable.
However the Soyuz has had 2 mishaps since 1971. In 1975 during the launch of Soyuz 18-1 the 3
rd stage failed to separate fully from the 2
nd. The automatic abort system was triggered, the Soyuz capsule was separated from launch vehicle and the crew survived, shaken but safe.
In 1983 Soyuz T10-1 caught fire on the pad. Once again the abort system was triggered. The launch escape tower fired and pulled the capsule and crew away from the rocket, which exploded. The crew were unhurt. In the 29 years since there have been no Soyuz failures.
In all there have been 113 manned Soyuz flights.
China has just 4 manned flights under its belt. It is still a new, largely untried system, compared to the tried, tested and for nearly 3 decades safe Soyuz system.
One final thing, if you really think the Chinese are safer than the Russian's then there is a village near their launch site that would disagree with you. During a commercial Long March launch in 1996 the launch vehicle failed and crashed into the village. The official death toll was 6 villagers but some estimates claim it was more than 100. Having civilians living that close to a launch site would be unthinkable in the West and in Russia.
Anyone that would currently chose a Chinese manned launch over a Russian would, in my opinion, either have to be ignorant of the facts I have just presented or be crazy. In years to come the Shenzhou/Long March combination may prove to be safe, but it is far too early to know that yet.
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